Aristocrats (43 page)

Allowing Bellamont to renege on his marriage contract would have seemed confirmation of his charges. The second Duke of Leinster, who did not want anyone to know that he had been fooled into striking a bargain for Carton when it might have come to him by law, was as anxious as Emily and Ogilvie to push through the wedding and confirm their version of events. Despite the blow to his pride, the young Duke
wrote Bellamont an open refutation of the rumours about his mother. ‘My Lord. I showed your Lordship’s letter to my mother and she declared to me that she was not married to Mr. Ogilvie and she was sorry to find that from his connection with the family by having the care and education of her children that report should have spread of there being a greater intimacy. I am your Lordship’s most obedient humble servant, Leinster.’ Emily had answered her son’s question with a careful sophistry. She denied that she was married, but she only regretted rumours of an affair. William did not notice. He was, as Sarah later noted, ‘terrified’ of his mother and felt compelled to stand by her. Armed with her statement he demanded that Bellamont marry his sister. Bellamont agreed with great reluctance, arriving at Carton on 20 August. Then, at the last moment, he refused to marry Emily Fitzgerald, lost his temper, reasserted his belief in the secret marriage and, in a fit of rage, denounced Emily as a ‘whore’. A general fracas followed. Bellamont claimed Emily Fitzgerald as his source of information and stuck by his story. Louisa, leaping to her sister’s defence, questioned Bellamont’s moral probity, saying that he had ruined the reputation of a Miss McDermot. There was talk of a duel; but after a day of arguments, claims and counterclaims, a day which Louisa looked back to as one of the worst in her life, Bellamont was harried and cajoled towards the minister and, amidst his protests, he and Emily Fitzgerald were married.

Emily allowed her sister and her sons to fight for her reputation in the dispute with Lord Bellamont. But the Duke of Leinster and, probably, Louisa knew that Bellamont was not far from the truth. It is more or less certain that some time in August, Ogilvie and Emily were married in Dublin, whether before or after Emily Fitzgerald’s marriage to Bellamont, no one revealed. Secrecy was sworn and the secret was kept safely. William, Louisa and Emily’s friend Lady Barrymore agreed to tell everyone that it looked as if Emily and Ogilvie might be married in the future. Only once in the years to
come did the Duke of Leinster let his mother’s secret slip out. Writing to his mother in May 1776, he apologised profusely for his error and in so doing confirmed that his mother had indeed married Ogilvie before they left Ireland. ‘I am sorry you should think that I either desired or ordered Mr. Lyster to say your marriage was in August; nor, I am sure, did he mean to do so. Therefore I hope you’ll excuse us both; for me it was inadvertency, and him, not knowing.’

Leaving their secrets behind, Emily and Ogilvie left Water-ford for Bordeaux on 8 September 1774. Apart from William, Duke of Leinster, Emily Bellamont and Lord Charles Fitzgerald, who was now in the navy, they took the whole Fitzgerald brood with them. Charlotte, now sixteen, was the eldest child still at home. She was old enough to be married but was regarded as plain, bad tempered and a family liability. Behind her came the children of the 1760s: Henry, aged thirteen; Sophia, twelve; Edward, eleven; Robert, nine; and Gerald who was eight. Finally there came what Caroline had called Emily’s ‘little, little family’, Fanny, aged four; Lucy, three; Louisa, two; and George Simon who was only a year old.

Emily, embarking for France and a new life, was nearly forty-three. She complained to Louisa of rheumatism and low spirits, but these were ways of describing the mixture of anxiety and joy that filled her. By defying both convention and rumour she had gathered everything she needed for her adventure, and she was determined to do in her own life what Rousseau, with his contradictory urges to subversion and sobriety, had been unable to do in
La Nouvelle Héloïse
. Not only was she keeping her lover, she was also going to live in style. Besides her jointure of £4,000 a year, they had allowances for the children and the extra money from William for Carton: plenty to live on in France where goods were cheap. Emily and Ogilvie would live in comfort if not in ducal style. Ogilvie was a shrewd investor. Emily was never without a carriage, and although she sometimes made do with last years’
fashions, she still read books straight off the press. When they eventually came back to Ireland, as Emily planned, Black Rock, enlarged and ennobled, would be waiting for them. All the time they were in France, Black Rock was Emily’s place of happy memories and dreams, the ‘dear place’ where she and Ogilvie had ‘spent so many happy hours in
conversation sweet
, as Milton says’.

Gazing over the prow of the
Nelly
as she bounced towards France in an early autumn storm, Ogilvie and Emily saw obstacles as well as delight ahead. Their return to Black Rock depended on Louisa’s skills in persuading their friends and relations to treat Mr Ogilvie as a gentleman and to accept Emily as an honourable woman. But their own future depended on creating a way to live. Emily’s first marriage had been governed by a set of conventions which she accepted and enjoyed. For this new life there were no rules. There had been unions between peers and actresses, earls and courtesans, but there were few precedents for the marriage of a duchess and family servant. Not only the pattern of day-to-day living, but the very framework of the relationship had to be forged. The money was almost all Emily’s, but the ability to manage it belonged exclusively to Ogilvie. The children were hers, but had been in his charge for six years. She had the social cachet, but the social distance between them was narrowing, despite her refusal to call herself anything other than the Duchess of Leinster. The old relationship of command and obedience was in disarray. She could no longer give her husband orders, he no longer need obey. Indeed, if Emily had turned for help to advice manuals written for women of more humble origins than herself, she would have found that society sanctioned a reversal of their old roles, he commanding, she complying. But their earlier relationship made even a notional compact of simple dominance and dependence impossible now. Wants, needs, duties and demands had all to be apportioned and worked out in the months to come; and, as Emily was to find, the strategies she had used to control her first husband were
useless with her second. This time it was she rather than her husband who was jealous and sexually infatuated. Much in this new partnership was undecided and at risk.

Three people had been left the uneasy possessors of Emily’s secret when she sailed away: Louisa, William and Lady Barrymore. William found the burden too heavy to bear and left Ireland soon after his mother, planning to keep out of the way in London for a few weeks. Inevitably, though, he met family friends who wanted to know the truth about his mother’s relationship with Ogilvie and he was soon scurrying back to Ireland to lie low at Carton. Lady Barrymore dropped judicious hints in Dublin drawing-rooms suggesting a wedding sometime in the future, while Louisa wrote to and visited family and friends by turns, ‘setting things right’ as she put it, with the Jocelyns, Rodens, the Clements, old Lady Clanbrassil, Mrs Crosbie, the two Mrs Nicholsons, Mrs Vesey, Lord Russborough, Mrs Greville and various Macartneys: all Emily’s particular friends. Together Louisa and William tackled old Lady Kildare, worried that she might object to Emily’s marriage more on her late son’s than her grandson’s behalf. William dutifully reported their conversation to his mother, saying, ‘we reasoned with her much on the subject, and I think we parted with her more reconciled.’ As usual the old Countess rose to the occasion. She wrote to Emily applauding her choice and decrying her haste; then she moved swiftly on to a recipe for eye drops.

Louisa’s approaches to the Lennox side of the family were cautious and gradual. Her first letter to Sarah, written two days after the emotional scenes at Emily Fitzgerald’s wedding, was evasive and contained. ‘The new married couple are to set out today for Bellamont Forest. They were married at Carton and all came here yesterday. She looks so happy its pleasant to see her and I hope he will be sensible of her merit, but he is so odd that he frightens one.’ But Louisa could not
withhold her news for long. Lady Barrymore had already dropped a hint about Emily’s intention to marry Ogilvie to Lady Ailesbury, who had passed it on to her daughter the Duchess of Richmond, and now everyone at Goodwood was agog to know the truth of what had already happened and what might happen in the future. On 25 August Louisa declared that the Earl of Bellamont was ‘a
bad man
’; on 4 September she admitted she felt uneasy and ‘unsettled’. By this time Sarah had guessed the cause of Louisa’s anxiety and asked point blank for confirmation or denial of Emily’s marriage to Ogilvie. Noting on the letter front ‘read this to yourself’, Louisa replied carefully to Sarah’s request, following the plan she had agreed with William and Lady Barrymore and which she thus described to Emily: ‘I say we
suspect
that things may be in time … This we tell in confidence as our own opinions, but positively assert that things are not yet concluded.’

To Sarah, Louisa wrote: ‘These reports about her being married are at present quite without foundation. But there is so great a partiality that I would not answer for its being always the case; and to say the truth, I should fear that these reports were likely to determine an event of that sort, as nothing but parting with
him
will prevent people saying
worse
if it should not end in marriage, and that step of parting with
him
would be the most cruel thing she could do by her children.’ Louisa offered two separate explanations for the marriage. The first was that marriage was forced on Emily by rumours; indeed that scandal had determined Emily upon a course by no means inevitable. The second, which Louisa threw in for good measure, was that the children needed Ogilvie and that the wedding was thus for their sake.

Both reasons rang hollow because the Goodwood household knew as well as Louisa that Emily would never be manoeuvred into a position of disadvantage. Louisa herself knew, but was unable to admit, that Emily’s affair with Ogilvie was not a sudden romance born from grief and
vulnerability, but a long-standing liaison based on shared interests and an active, mutual passion. At Goodwood, Sarah and the Duchess of Richmond easily saw through Louisa’s queasy reasoning. The Duchess said that if Emily had no feelings for Ogilvie then there was absolutely nothing wrong with keeping him on as an employee. Sarah wrote to Louisa saying that she suspected that Ogilvie had been in love with Emily for some time. The Duke of Richmond added that he thought that Emily returned Ogilvie’s feelings. Louisa was astonished at Sarah’s perspicacity, writing to Emily six weeks after the
Nelly
sailed: ‘[Sarah’s] loving you is not extraordinary, but her knowledge of the human heart is a little so I do think. Do you know that from what she picked up from me some years ago, and from you, when you were in England, the thought of
his
being in love with you had come into her head more than once, and when she told me the last time I saw her that we should
spoil him
, she meant it for a hint … She knows the exact progress your heart made and understands how this attachment came about as well as if she had read your mind … She says that Mr. Ogilvie could not but fall in love with you when he saw your character in the brightest light, which he had an opportunity of doing more than anybody, as you talked to him about your children.’ After a few weeks the red herrings about Bellamont’s scandal-mongering and the welfare of the children were quietly dropped.

With varying degrees of amazement and reluctance members of the family came to understand that Emily and Ogilvie were in love and that their marriage was either concluded or inevitable. While her siblings shifted, turned and became reconciled, Emily herself waited, using Louisa as a conduit to family approbation, allowing her daughter Charlotte to give news of the party’s progress through France and leaving Ogilvie the difficult task of putting his relationship with Louisa on to a footing of familial friendship. The second Duke of Leinster was shocked by his mother’s insouciance but he was far
too much in awe of her to do anything other than accept her marriage and eventual return to Ireland, contenting himself with writing on 11 September 1774: ‘I confess my pride will be hurt and I feel sorry for it, and though I shall never feel pleasant at the sight of Mr. O. – from the idea – yet if properly managed we may live in friendship, though not in that degree of intimacy that perhaps you might wish or require us, yet a line must be drawn. Let what will happen, I shall not divulge your secret, nor will I give you up.’

The Duke and Duchess of Richmond, older and more knowing than the young Duke of Leinster, discounted their own pride and concentrated on the difficulties Emily might encounter by marrying someone who was not only her social inferior but had also been, until recently, receiving wages from her husband. They were accustomed to thinking of Ogilvie – if they thought of him at all – as a man who took orders and they had no idea how to receive him as one of the family; and this was especially true for Louisa who had known Ogilvie for six years as a tutor. But Louisa needed her sister’s love and wanted to be generous towards Ogilvie. On 13 September she sat down and confessed to Emily both her anxieties and her determination to overcome them. ‘My feelings about it have just been these. Two or three days at most, I believe, my pride was a little hurt. I am not sure it was my own pride; I rather think it was the prejudice of the world which one imbibes insensibly more than one thinks. But the more I consider it, the less I have to say about it. I agree with Sally, who says that one thinks it more desirable for you not to change your situation at all, but if you do I am clear in my opinion that it is the best match you can make … Give my affectionate sisterly love to Mr. Ogilvie, for whom I feel it … God bless you, my dearest, dearest, sister; I do love you with all my heart and soul.’