Aristocrats (40 page)

By the time the party reached Paris at the end of October, Caroline’s anger had burst out from under her dejection. She felt deserted by her siblings. The Duke of Richmond was hunting at Aubigny, Louisa and Emily stayed put in Ireland and Sarah was still lost to the family. She, derided by the Duke of Leinster as being careless of her sisters, was left to accompany Cecilia on a hopeless journey and watch her die. To her daughter-in-law Mary Caroline wrote on 1 November, ‘when I think of the trouble, plague and distress my own family have brought me into … [I] determine fully to have done with them when this sad event is over and trouble myself no more about anyone but my own children and yours.’ At the same time she wrote to Louisa asking why nobody had helped with the expenses of Bristol and the Paris journey, adding angrily that the family had ‘imposed a hard task upon her’.

Caroline’s task did not last much longer. Cecilia died quietly, ‘without a pang or a fight’ in the afternoon of 13 November 1769 as Caroline watched over her. Her departure from the world was as muted as her life in it. At the end her only regret was that Emily was not with her.

Grief and anger mixed together drove Caroline to her writing-table. Unwilling to reopen any communication with Carton, she wrote to the Duke of Richmond, to Louisa and, repeatedly, to Ste and Mary. ‘These are melancholy times my dear Ste,’ she wrote a few hours after Cecilia’s death, adding, ‘many, many things I have had to vex me of late.’ Paris failed to distract her. ‘Nothing here amuses me
that I used to like,’ she said, so the party left soon afterwards for the south.

Better news for the family arrived at Carton and Nice at the beginning of December. Sarah had left Lord William Gordon and was going to Goodwood with little Louisa Bunbury. She promised not to return to Gordon and to live a penitent and retired life under her brother’s protection. Even so, Caroline kept her distance, calling herself Sarah’s friend rather than sister and raising immediate doubts about the plan’s success. ‘I am as glad as any of her friends at the step she has taken, but should be more glad had I much dependence on the steadiness of her reputation. However, one must hope for the future and be pleased with the present.’ Of all the family, Caroline was the most tolerant of moral frailty. If her verdict on Sarah’s rehabilitation was so lukewarm, the attitudes of Louisa and the Duke of Leinster would be much more stringent and Sarah’s course of penitence would be a long one.

Sarah arrived at Goodwood in early December 1769. She stayed in the main house for a few weeks and then moved, with her child, maid and nurse, to Halnaker, a small manor house on the estate. Halnaker was an old-fashioned house, stone on the ground floor, half timbering above with mullioned windows and deep embrasures; a house lacking all the comforts of modernity. Sarah was immediately lonely there. Gordon returned to his family in Scotland. Neither parted unwillingly, but both had regrets, Sarah for her child, Lord William for himself. Although she was sensitive to the mention of Gordon’s name for years to come, Sarah’s remorse saw off the best part of lust, leaving only regret and memory. Once installed at Goodwood she did not want Lord William back.

What Sarah did want and what her future offered was a problem that engrossed the whole family. She was only twenty-four and her beauty and vivacity would soon return.
It seemed unlikely that she would spend the rest of her life in complete retirement. But she was ostracised from society. Respectable men and women, her erstwhile friends and acquaintances, would not or could not see and receive her. When there were guests at Goodwood she had to stay out of sight. Even her relatives were careful. Conolly was nervous about having her at Castletown and Louisa nursed his wishes to the point of excess. The Duke of Leinster barred her categorically from visiting or even writing to Emily. Holland House was Sarah’s best hope of a respite from Sussex, but until Caroline’s anger against the family died down even its doors were closed to her.

After their early anger had subsided Emily and Caroline both expressed their wish that Bunbury would divorce Sarah and that eventually she might marry again, even if she refused to marry Gordon. Louisa and the Duke of Richmond, on the other hand, strongly urged that Sarah should return to Bunbury and live a life of humble contrition. Still full of guilt and desperate for the family’s forgiveness, Sarah agreed, saying that going back to Barton was the only restitution she could make for her crime.

While the family waited for Bunbury to decide Sarah’s fate, the Duke and Louisa urged on Sarah the necessity of behaviour that reflected her situation. Just as before Sarah had studied how to please the King now she practised the display of penitence. At first her demeanour of settled sadness was everything that Louisa and the Duke of Richmond demanded, and she was careful that her behaviour and dress showed an equal desire for atonement. Louisa, arriving at Goodwood in the New Year, described Sarah’s manner to Emily with satisfaction. ‘She likes this quiet life of all things, and seems to have attention to the most trifling things. One thing is her dress. She means to study whatever is cheapest and plainest. And she does dress quite plain, no conceits of any sort.’ And when Louisa suggested that a local painter come and give them lessons in oils, Sarah, unpowdered and
sombrely dressed, asked on cue, ‘was he a neat, fine gentleman, because if he was she thought it would not be so proper for her to see him.’

Louisa Bunbury softened Louisa’s heart by calling her ‘Aunt’, ‘quite plainly’. But Sarah came in for frequent chastisement. ‘She tells my brother and I everything she thinks, and is so desirous of being set right where she is wrong and very ready to accuse herself of doing wrong,’ Louisa reported to Emily. Sarah pleased Louisa by saying that ‘her situation’ was ‘the best that she could have wished for herself at present’.

Louisa and, to a lesser extent the Duke of Richmond, wanted Sarah to suffer for the havoc she had unwittingly unleashed in the family. Louisa was bearing a heavy burden, carrying the confidences of all her siblings and entrusted by them with the task of gluing the broken vessel of family happiness back together again. Some of this anxiety she passed on to Sarah as a need to share out the misery. To herself Louisa explained her pleasure at Sarah’s misery a different way. It was, as she told Emily, a happiness at recognising Sarah’s underlying goodness of heart. ‘From her own account of herself, moments of cheerfulness was the most she could brag of, for happiness she had not, and the idea of wrong was so constantly present to her thoughts that she could never drive it away. I own I feel great pleasure when she relates all she suffered, for I have the happiness of discovering such a perfect good mind throughout it all.’

Louisa also had other reasons for wanting Sarah to plumb the full depths of remorse. In the first place, Sarah’s affair threatened to undermine one of the foundations of Louisa’s life. Louisa had always believed that doing good and being good brought happiness and, above all, love. Virtue secured her place in the family. If Sarah’s crime went not only unpunished, but swiftly forgiven, and if Sarah was just as loved as an adulteress as a wife, then Louisa’s life, based on goodness and service, was devalued. Louisa needed Sarah to feel miserable to confirm her own sense of worth.

In the second place, part of Louisa (and a part that, unlike Caroline, she had never managed to work into the fabric of her life) was fascinated by misdemeanour. Back in London in February 1770, Louisa went to a masquerade in Soho. At first she said she would not dress up but simply disguise herself with a mask of white trimmed with gold. But at the last minute she changed her mind and went dressed as an abbess in a white-corded gown, beads, gauze, black veil and ‘scarlet knot to tie the diamond cross’. As everyone knew, an abbess was not so much a figure of goodness as a symbol of depravity, the common name for a Covent Garden procuress, a keeper of prostitutes and doyen of brothels. So Louisa saw herself as both protectress and procuress, an ambiguous figure who had not only tried to save Sarah from her fate but had also connived at it, turning a blind eye to her sister’s affair. She enjoyed the evening enormously, writing to Emily, ‘I was never more diverted than at the masquerade; it was one of the prettiest sights I ever saw.’ But Louisa could only play at being bad. As soon as her costume came off she tried to shed her guilty delight in transgression and frowned even more strongly upon it in everyday life. Sarah embodied sinfulness and she must regret her behaviour.

But Sarah’s regret could not be everlasting. Another, more mundane life had to take the place of grandiloquent sorrow, especially since Bunbury showed no sign of wanting her back. Gradually her spirits improved and she started to want more than family approbation for her remorse. By the summer of 1770, she was often cheerful for days at a time. She loved her precocious daughter, carefully recording her first babbles, syllables and words, and she was happy at Goodwood if there was a family party she could join. In the spring of 1771 Sarah visited Louisa, Caroline and Lord Holland in Bath, a place where a woman ostracised from London society could go with impunity. Caroline was delighted to see her and noted in her journal, ‘Miss Bunbury a charming child’. After this reconciliation with Caroline, Sarah eased her way back into the
family circle. She saw Ste and Charles James Fox and she visited her aunt Lady Albemarle. The O’Briens arrived back from New York in 1770 and Sarah soon became intimate with Susan again. Sarah’s transgression meant it was now hard to decide whose morality was the more compromised, the lady turned adulteress or the heiress who had married the actor: they were equally degraded and outcast.

Louisa was anxious about Sarah’s rehabilitation. She wrote and counselled caution and deception. No one must think that Sarah was too cheerful. ‘You have so little disguise that when you feel in spirits you allow your natural vitality to appear. I dislike disguise as much as anybody can do, and yet I think in your case a little is absolutely necessary … I would have you use disguise enough to look grave.’ As late as 1772, nearly four years after Louisa Bunbury’s birth, Louisa was still watching Sarah for signs that she might slip back into frivolity and immorality. She told her sister not to be too cheerful in public and warned her against the company of men, especially men who might lead her astray. Charles James Fox, who combined free thought with charm, was an especial risk, in Louisa’s view, not just to Sarah but to every woman. ‘Dear Charles,’ she wrote, ‘it seems so odd to talk of him as if of a dangerous person, but indeed he is to you or to any young woman with whom he converses freely … His free notions with respect to religion and women are his greatest faults.’ Army officers, too, were the object of Louisa’s censure; they joined glamour to immorality.

Louisa reluctantly recognised that her sister deserved small, rationed rewards for good behaviour. By the early 1770s Sarah was allowed to go to Kingsgate and to London, although she rarely went beyond the confines of Holland House Park and Whitehall. Even public spaces opened up to her although some, like the Court, would be closed for ever. After a few years of penance Sarah could venture again to pleasure gardens, theatres and the painter’s studio – places where morality was sufficiently compromised every day to let
a fallen woman go without comment. In the mid-1770s Sarah described a foray to London to Emily. ‘The Duchess [of Richmond] was going to town for a short time. The town was remarkably empty as it always is in September because of the shooting, so I thought it would be wiser to take the opportunity, as I knew I could not go without a fuss till next September … I one day went with the Duchess to see a new ballroom that’s prettily fitted up, and to look at Sir Joshua’s pictures; and, that one jaunt excepted, I never went out of Whitehall walls or saw a single creature, for I told nobody that I was in town so nobody thought about me.’ Confined in Richmond House, Sarah contented herself with armchair shopping, ‘making the shopkeepers bring me all sorts of pretty things to look at, as I wanted to see all that was to be seen and yet not go out.’

At Holland House Sarah was soon back in Lord Holland’s heart and Caroline quickly forgave her. Chastisement held few attractions for Caroline. Besides, welcoming Sarah back was one way Caroline could demonstrate to the Duke of Leinster that she did indeed care for her sisters. Louisa thought that Sarah’s visits to Holland House would give her ‘the reputation of living in the world again’, but Sarah did not stop going. She was loved and needed there. Indeed, very soon it was not so much Caroline who was offering succour to Sarah as the other way round. Caroline was distressed about her sons, miserable about Henry and seemed to be in failing health.

PART TWO

‘That miserable sickness in her stomach still continues’.

Louisa to Sarah, 23 April 1774.

Caroline had looked forward to old age. ‘I flatter myself I shall go gently down the hill to a better place,’ she wrote to
Emily in 1768 when she was forty-five. She had also happily contemplated a retirement from politics that would be made serene and comfortable by the love of her husband, sons and sisters. But when her fiftieth birthday came round at the end of March 1773, Caroline surveyed her world and found it wanting. Lord Holland was making no attempt to stop life drifting away from him. He had, as Charles James Fox put it later, ‘given up’, lost interest in the pursuits of the living and fixed his sights on oblivion. The quarrel between the Hollands and the Leinsters was still stuck on the rock of mutual obstinacy and she seemed to be in the throes of the menopause, bleeding painfully, sometimes for weeks on end. To cap it all, her sons’ extravagant gambling was enthralling the press and taxing even the vast Fox fortune.