Aristocrats (44 page)

Once Emily’s wedding was announced as certain, Sarah was her sister’s most vociferous supporter. Love and revere Emily as she did, Sarah also saw advantages for herself in her
sister’s marriage. She relished both the drama of the event and the feeling that Emily’s effrontery threw her own misdemeanours into the past and she was delighted that there were now two scapegraces in the family. Sarah was also shrewd enough to recognise Ogilvie’s importance to Emily and she lavished upon him her most grandiloquent sentences. ‘Though I am not known to Mr. Ogilvie by sight, yet I flatter myself I am enough known to him by my affection for you as to give me a right to begin my acquaintance with him now more personally … I flatter myself that he will one day come among us and take as a
right
that regard, affection and esteem which everybody who knows you ought to be already inclined to give him from his being your choice.’ Sarah wrote on, happy to have a crisis to relieve the boredom of Halnaker and complete her reconciliation with her sister. Ogilvie was in no position to cavil at Sarah’s degradation. So Sarah’s happiness was genuine and untrammelled: she had nothing to lose and much to gain. From her isolation in Sussex she looked joyfully forward to weeks at Black Rock chatting to her sister while little Louisa played with her Leinster cousins.

As Emily’s entourage travelled slowly from Bordeaux, where the
Nelly
had docked in the middle of September, and up the valley of the Garonne river to Toulouse, Charlotte Fitzgerald coyly recorded its progress in fictionalised form. She kept a diary in which Emily was called ‘Stella’, that most literary of heroines, and Mr. Ogilvie was ‘Davy’. At first the entries were commonplace. There was little to report from Bordeaux or on the road except for the minutiae of health, weather and travel. But on 26 October 1774 Charlotte recorded, as if it were the final chapter of a novel, a more important event. ‘After breakfast Stella, Davy and Charlotte had a very interesting conversation on a subject which Davy and Charlotte had been conversing on before breakfast and which determined Stella upon a certain point … Returned to dinner to the Inn where the Reverend Mr. Ellison, a Fellow of Trinity
College, Dublin, was waiting for them. As dearest Stella had been engaged for some time to marry Davy, she was prevailed upon by his entreaties to embrace this favourable opportunity of an English clergyman, and condescended to make Davy the happiest of men by fulfilling that engagement on which the happiness of life depended. The marriage ceremony was performed by Mr. Ellison after dinner in the presence of Charlotte and Mrs. Rowley, the lovely Stella’s woman. Stella was as beautiful as an angel. Mr. Ellison went away soon after that. Charlotte wrote letters and the lovely and adorable Stella and Davy spent a happy, dear evening.’

Mr Ellison the clergyman was the excuse rather than the reason for this ceremony. Perhaps the real cause lay dividing in Emily’s womb: she was or soon would be pregnant again. Though she might have an affair with Mr Ogilvie and even travel through France with him, she could not, after the announcement of their engagement, have his child without publicly becoming his wife.

The family had been warned to expect Emily’s announcement. But they did not know why Emily had hurried into matrimony so soon and they were surprised that she risked extra censure by marrying Ogilvie while she was conspicuously a widow, draped in black and still in mourning for her first husband. To marry so soon after the Duke of Leinster’s death suggested a lack of reverence for his memory, an immoderate passion for his successor, a sudden need for legitimacy, or all three. Despite her support for her sister, Sarah could not resist reporting, on 11 December, that the Duke of Richmond and Lord George Lennox ‘think it will hurt you vastly in the world to have married within even a year after your mourning; and they are vastly hurt at its being before the mourning was out.’ But in the wider world, talk of Emily’s haste was drowned out in wonder at the fact of the wedding itself. Mrs Delany, the famous conchologist, gossip and creator of cutouts, wrote to a friend: ‘I mentioned the Duchess of Leinster’s marriage to her son’s tutor. People
wonder at her marriage, as she is reckoned one of the proudest and most expensive women in the world. But perhaps she thought it incumbent (as Lady Brown says of Her Grace) “to marry and make an honest man of him”.’

Emily’s response to this sort of gossip was silence; to her brother’s disapproval it was a disarming letter in which she accepted some of his criticisms, deflected others and won everybody round. ‘I am content that you should call me a fool, and an
old fool
, that you should blame me and say you did not think me capable of such a folly; talk me over, say what you please, but remember that all I ask of you is your affection and tenderness.’ Sarah was amazed and impressed. Describing Emily’s letter to Susan O’Brien, Sarah wrote: ‘My brother says there is no resisting her owning herself in the wrong and begging so hard to be loved … I assure you, my sister
gains
friends instead of losing any by her manner.’

Three months after the marriage ceremony in Toulouse Emily and Ogilvie seemed to have swept away all the major obstacles to the family’s acceptance of their unorthodox union. Louisa had busied herself creating a pedigree for Ogilvie. ‘I don’t exactly know Mr. Ogilvie’s age, he is related to Lord Finletta, and was disappointed by the late Lord of that name, of being provided for, as he had promised to do something for him; but having some dispute with him on that account, he came to Ireland where he had some friends, who assisted him in setting up a school, I believe the very first in Dublin … This is his history, which does not in any shape contradict what we heard about his being of a good gentleman’s family.’ But a genealogy was not really necessary; everyone knew that Ogilvie was a man of obscure origins and a good education and everyone knew that Emily was infatuated with him. She had managed the transition from adulteress to wife with magnificent aplomb, picking up a house and some extra cash on the way. But now she and Ogilvie faced a much greater, more mundane challenge. They had to forge a set of rules to live by and work out ways to manage their emotions, their children, their friends, finances and everyday life.

PART THREE

‘Joy of my heart, charm of my life, comfort of my soul’

Emily to Ogilvie, 5 July 1777
.

From the very beginning of their married life it was obvious that Emily and Ogilvie would not adhere to the friendly, courteous, frequently distant model of aristocratic unions. Both of them saw passion and emotional entanglement as the driving force in their relationship. When she fell in love with Ogilie the central features of Emily’s life were transformed and marriage to him fixed this change irrevocably. Emily’s children and sisters had previously taken pride of place in her heart. Now Ogilvie emphatically came first; and if Louisa and Sarah accepted the change as they accepted everything that Emily dealt out to them, many of the Fitzgerald children did not. Lucy and Sophia, in particular, resented their stepfather’s dominance and their mother’s love for him. They battled against Ogilvie all their lives, trying hopelessly to win their mother back.

For a decade after her marriage, Emily was enfolded in the drama of her passion for Ogilvie, calling her feeling ‘the madness of love’ and luxuriating in its extremity. When Ogilvie went away, Emily described herself as ‘whimpering like a fool’, bereft of his body and his conversation. None the less, this was no one-sided dependence. On the strength both of their previous relationship, her passion and fashionable conventions of marital fidelity, Emily made demands on her husband that she had never made upon the Duke of Leinster. She wanted Ogilvie by her side every day and she asked for absolute fidelity from him. Even a glance at another woman was tantamount to a betrayal. In 1778, Emily became convinced that Ogilvie was attracted to one of their servants; a common occurrence at Carton, but now something that aroused suspicion and torment. ‘I own to you, I fret constantly,’ she wrote to Ogilvie, after nursing her jealousy for
weeks. ‘Why should I conceal it? Your manner and looks with that girl Marianne … have haunted me, and your wanting so precipitously to get her out of the house seems to confirm to me that my fears are not without foundation. You see by this how high an opinion I have of your heart, honour, humanity and sentiments towards me, since the same circumstances could be looked upon in direct opposite light. But I know you so well, my dear William, that I am certain you would wish to remove any object that you thought likely to cause me any inconvenience, but, at the same time I have the strongest dependence on your never acting contrary to the love you have shown me. I cannot help being jealous of what your intentions may sometimes be.’

Emily’s obsessional jealousy climbed to extravagant heights whenever Ogilvie went away. In 1777 he was briefly in London, and Emily convinced herself that every woman in the drawing-rooms was plotting to snatch her humble balding husband from her arms. She wrote to him in a fever of imagined disaster. ‘God knows, my angel, if the beauties of the age will but spare me one dear heart on which depends my all, I would willingly let them enjoy the triumph of beauty. But when I think that by their allurements and to gratify the vanity of a moment they may rob me of all my heart holds dear, I feel to hate them.’

Emily’s fears, her ‘nervous horrors’ and ‘sinkings’ were real enough, despite being unfounded. But her jealousy was not purely self-destructive. She felt with Ogilvie, as she had never felt with the Duke, that she had a right to feel jealous and a right to make demands upon her husband. So her outbursts, however abject, were founded on a new kind of confidence: that the needs and rights in this marriage were finely balanced. Although she may have doubted it temporarily Emily also knew that Ogilvie was, as he told Sarah, a ‘fool’ about her and that he needed her as much as she needed him.

Ogilvie was every bit as committed as Emily to the romance of their marriage. He deferred to his wife in matters
of taste, offered her companionship and always loved her body. In 1783, when Emily was fifty-one and he a decade younger, he wrote to her from London: ‘I am really dying with impatience to see your beautiful face again and to hug your lovely person in my fond loving arms – to meet your warm tender embraces and to hang on your sweet balmy lips. I am dying to call you mine again, to feel you such and to assure you of my unalterable love and affection.’

Despite such declarations, Ogilvie never gave way to jealousy and never doubted that his love was returned. Because of his self-control and confidence he maintained an emotional dominance in the relationship. Emily would always have the social distinction and most of the money, but Ogilvie’s control of her heart more than balanced any advantage birth and her jointure gave her. At times Ogilvie was ruthless in his control, using Emily’s love for him to extract gestures of submission. When they were parted in 1777, Emily, desperate to have him back, wrote abjectly, ‘believe there is nothing I will not do that you wish which I
can
do. I’ll drink no tea, eat no butter, I’ll ride.’ She even gloried in her submissiveness, writing a few days later, ‘dearest love, how I do long to have you scold me.’ But although she was eager to cede her emotional independence to her husband, Emily never abandoned her emotional rights. Ogilvie might control her feelings but she demanded a good price for them. So a finely balanced relationship developed, a fragile house of cards that stayed standing because each partner had the means to bring it crashing down.

Inside this self-made mansion of love Ogilvie and Emily roamed freely. They were well aware that their situation was, as Emily put it, ‘an uncommon one’ and ‘uncommonly happy’. ‘Let me tell you ten thousand million of times that I love you to distraction,’ Emily wrote in 1777. She called her husband ‘joy of my heart, charm of my life, comfort of my soul’ and made much of their married state. ‘Come to my heart my dear husband, love, friend, all that is dear,’ she
wrote in 1777, signing herself ‘ever your tender and affectionate wife,’ adding, ‘how pleasant to write those words!’ Ogilvie was her ‘sweet William’, her ‘dearest angel’. She was his ‘adorable angel’ and his ‘dearest rogue’.

They had much in common besides love. Emily described Ogilvie as ‘one of us’, a man in the Lennox mould who united strong feeling with a dependence on reason. Like the Lennoxes, Ogilvie loved books, children and conversation. He was a committed Whig and a supporter of the rights of colonists. Like Louisa, Emily and Sarah he vehemently defended the rights of the Irish Parliament against encroachment from Westminster, and like all the Lennoxes he was a Francophile and a good French speaker (although as Sarah was quick to point out, his French emerged strongly salted with a ‘Scotch’ accent). Within this union of views there were differences. Ogilvie was less worldly and more religious than Emily. He condemned drawing-rooms and theatres as harmful to youthful minds and he insisted on daily religious observance. About the theatre Emily demurred. It never lost its allure for her; she continued to go whenever she could and she encouraged her children in amateur theatricals and their cult of Mrs Siddons. But she did go to church, if there was an Anglican service to be had, and read soothing psalms and sermons in troubled times. In the 1790s when family life and national politics came together with disastrous results, Emily read and re-read Blair and Prior, the most popular sermonisers of the day, comforted as much by their familiarity and ‘pretty expressions’ as by their sentiments.