Aristocrats (48 page)

The family was also important. Emily wanted her sons to acknowledge Ogilvie as a man of influence and intelligence and it annoyed her that her older sons enjoyed political influence as a birthright. Ogilvie himself had little interest in politics. He was a canny investor and a good businessman. But Emily was determined that he should have a political career. So, to please his mother, the Duke of Leinster brought Ogilvie into the Irish House of Commons as Member for one of the Boroughs under his control.

Once in Parliament, Ogilvie joined Charles, Henry and Edward Fitzgerald as one of the Duke of Leinster’s members. In the dying days of the North administration they were nominally in opposition, but the position changed radically when Charles Fox and the Duke of Richmond came into office in the Marquis of Rockingham’s administration. While Irish ‘patriots’ like Leinster and Conolly could not be seen to be in open alliance with Dublin Castle, they sensed that there could be tremendous advantages to working with an administration that was both personally and politically sympathetic. Emily saw opportunities for Ogilvie. She despised both Conolly and her own son as ‘très médiocre’ and hoped that Ogilvie could step in and command the MPs returned by her son and brother-in-law. She also hoped that he could get a lucrative office out of the London government.

Emily’s eye settled on the vacant office of head of the Registry of Deeds in Ireland, a fat sinecure of £1,500 a year. Almost as soon as Richmond and Fox came into government in the new administration in March 1782, Ogilvie was enquiring about the place. Failing to extract it from the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Portland, he set off for London at the beginning of July.

*

Ogilvie could not have arrived in London at a less propitious moment. Rockingham’s death on 1 July sparked off eighteen months of turmoil that completely changed not only the political life of the nation but also the lives and loyalties of the extended Richmond–Fox–Leinster family. Political differences caused nearly irreparable schisms between brothers and sisters, and parents and children. As the 1780s wore on into the 1790s, the gulf widened. The Regency crisis of 1788, followed by the French Revolution which began the next year, broke up for ever the fifty-year-old alliance which had been set up with Emily’s marriage to the Duke of Leinster and Caroline’s elopement with Henry Fox.

The Marquis of Rockingham’s death brought Lord Shelburne to power. Ogilvie expected to arrive in London and find that, in Shelburne’s new administration, Charles Fox was Foreign Secretary and the Duke of Richmond was Master of the Ordnance with a Cabinet place. But Fox refused to serve under Shelburne. He suspected Shelburne of answering first to the King and only second to the Cabinet. But he had not forgotten his parents’ belief in Shelburne’s treachery twenty years before, so he also hated him on their behalf. Fox resigned. Richmond stayed with Shelburne’s government. Relations between them, lukewarm for some time, cooled rapidly as Fox mercilessly attacked the government from the back benches.

The split between Richmond and Fox determined the line along which family loyalties would divide in the next decade. Richmond believed that loyalty from his sisters was due to the family as an institution. But he also quickly came to see any affection for Fox, or any sympathy with Fox’s escalating hostility to the Crown, as a personal betrayal, reasoning that he gave his sisters sanctuary in difficult times and that in return they should offer him loyalty of both heart and mind. Emily agreed, saying that taking opposite sides from her brother seemed ‘unnatural’; she wished she could have supported him, both as her brother and as head of the family. But
she did not. Politics was a matter of belief as well as of family alliances. If the family had ever taken precedence over principle, it could no longer do so by the 1780s, when divisions centred on such fundamental issues as the King’s relationship to Lords and Commons and the rights and wrongs of the French Revolution. Many families were torn apart by differences on these issues; women and many others who had no franchise were just as vociferous about their beliefs as those directly involved in the political process. Besides, Emily had never allowed her husbands or brothers to speak for her on political matters.

Louisa and Sarah were initially cautious in deciding between Richmond and Fox. ‘I cannot submit my faith implicitly to the forecast of either my brother or nephew, each being liable to err in judgement,’ Sarah wrote. ‘I have at least the pleasure to think both act right in following their ideas of right.’ Louisa, as usual, took her brother’s side more eagerly, saying: ‘in regard to his present politics, I hear various opinions regarding them and am very sure I am no judge of them, but I have a
feel
that he is right.’ When Ogilvie came to London he was initially even-handed, waiting (without success) on Charles Fox, visiting Richmond House and presenting himself to Emily’s old aunt, Lady Albemarle. But when he had no success in his quest for a sinecure it was to Fox that he turned for help.

Only a few years before Fox had transfixed the drawing-rooms with a Francophile outfit of red-heeled shoes and a wig of cascading blue curls. In opposition he still gambled, whored and drank, but he was gradually reshaping his persona from that of salon wit to that of ‘champion of the people’, a man who stood against Crown and Court. He abandoned salon dress for ‘undress’, a simple frock-coat and breeches, usually in the buff and blue of Washington’s army, and exposed his thinning curls to the wind. Gradually, as he lurched from indebtedness to bankruptcy, this outfit became more tattered. Yet Fox’s deliberate slovenliness made him
seem like Dr Johnson, not so much an ordinary man of the people but an extraordinary, even saintly being. People marvelled at Fox’s honesty and simplicity and politely turned the other way when he indulged his habit of clearing his throat and spitting on the carpet.

Ogilvie, just learning to feel at ease with court dress and manners, was nonplussed by the mixture of manufactured disorder and unself-conscious eccentricity that Fox displayed. He grumbled to Emily that he waited in vain for hours to see him. But when he eventually had his audience, Ogilvie was completely charmed. Fox became Emily’s ‘dear nephew’. Soon he was more: a sinner-saint, a way of life, almost a religion. This kind of conversion – which the Duke of Richmond watched with growing frustration – was only partly political. People loved Fox because he made his friends and followers feel desired and benevolent. He was a shy man, Emily said, and one who wanted always to think the best of his friends. People mistook shyness for modesty, attention for affection. Arriving indifferent, they went away infatuated: Ogilvie, despite his capacity for reserve and domination, was no different. He went back to Ireland without the office he came for but with a new love, Charles James Fox.

Sarah knew Fox’s charms of old. But in deference to Napier’s career she kept her distance from her nephew throughout the autumn and winter of 1782. In March of the following year she received a small reward. ‘Mr. Conway has
at my request
(not my brother’s) given Mr. N. a Captain’s commission in the 100th Regiment,’ which was stationed in the East Indies. ‘I confess I shall consider it a little hard,’ she concluded bitterly to Susan, ‘that having such connections in the last 2 ministries it ends, after one year, in sending my husband to the East Indies a Captain.’

Before Sarah could ask for the major’s commission, Richmond was out of office and Fox, in alliance with his old enemy, North, was back in. The King, hostile from the start to the new regime, was determined not ‘to grant a single peerage or mark of favour’ as he put it. The 100th Regiment was
disbanded and Napier, having given up his place at the Woolwich Laboratory, remained a captain on half pay. Louisa worried about him, writing to Ogilvie in 1783: ‘Mr. Napier hangs upon my mind. I wish very much that something was settled about him, for I see that they will have millions of children – and yet he is so army mad that I think one should run a great risk of making him uncomfortable by desiring him to give it up.’

The general election of 1784 that followed the defeat of the East India Bill, and thus of the Fox/North coalition, ended any lingering hopes that Emily and Sarah had about preferment for their husbands. It also completed the first stage in what Emily’s son Charles Fitzgerald called ‘the revolution in our family politics’. Charles Fitzgerald was still a Foxite in the 1780s and he filled his letters during the election campaign with praise of Fox and denigration of the Duke of Richmond, secure in the knowledge that Emily took Fox’s side. Louisa warned Sarah to be on her guard if she met any Conolly relatives who were not Foxites and told her not to let out her true ‘sentiments’.

Fox himself scraped back into Parliament in the election. But many of his supporters, including Sarah’s ex-husband Sir Charles Bunbury, did not. The Fox/North coalition was roundly defeated, and when William Pitt formed a new administration, the Duke of Richmond was rewarded for his support with his old office, the Ordnance. Emily and Sarah remained on Fox’s side. Emily was anxious to avoid disagreement with her brothers. So she shut up her new house in Harley Street, where she had frequently entertained Fox and his associates (including the ‘dear Duchess’ of Devonshire) during the election campaign, and went to Ireland for the summer. In June, Louisa offered the Napiers, who were still drifting without any home or prospect of augmenting their income, the use of Stretton Hall in Staffordshire. Stretton was not far from the road which took Dublin travellers to and from the packets at Park Gate. Conolly kept the house ‘as a
place to retire to, in case of an unpleasant situation in this country, which is an idea that has possessed his mind these five or six years past.’ For forty years Stretton had been occupied by a few servants, a symbol of Conolly’s refusal to countenance an Irishness that, in English eyes, he could never lose. The Napiers moved into the Hall in August 1784, planning to stay until their campaign for a commission was successful. Despite her growing family, Sarah was bored in the country. ‘We are still here,’ she wrote to Susan sometime that winter, ‘and I fancy shall not stir, unless the dearness of the country shall drive us into Wales.’ A few months later they moved out, travelling to Castletown in search of even cheaper living and a cure for Louisa Bunbury, who had developed consumption.

The Napiers’ arrival at Castletown signalled a new phase not just in Sarah’s life but in those of Louisa and Emily too. For the first time in many years the sisters were together; ‘we three’ Sarah called them, as if they were Macbeth’s witches, sitting over the fire concocting plans. They all had similar preoccupations. Emily and Ogilvie were at Frescati with Sophia, Lucy, Cecilia and Mimi (but without Lord George Simon, who had died in 1783). Edward Fitzgerald, on leave from the army since the end of the American war, was often there. Until the summer of 1786, Ogilvie wrote later, ‘he was with us, indeed, wherever we went, and those were the happiest years of our lives.’ Louisa was happy too. When Sarah had given birth to a girl in 1783, Louisa had asked to adopt her, saying that Sarah was far more interested in boys than girls. Sarah refused at first but then repented, telling Susan O’Brien that consideration of the child’s prospects if Louisa adopted her had changed her mind.

Emily Napier arrived at Castletown in December 1784, ‘given away’ as she bitterly described it later. Louisa became everything but her legal mother to her. Children had lived at Castletown before: Louisa had given a home to two of her nieces, Conolly’s sister’s children, whose mother had died.
But Emily Napier was different. She was Sarah’s child, a blood relation. Two weeks after she arrived, Louisa wrote delightedly to Sarah: ‘Mr. Conolly says she will be the prettiest Lennox that ever was seen, and I really do see a likeness to my sister Leinster. The first look struck me to be that of Cecilia’s but now I think it is my sister Leinster.’ Louisa felt guilty taking Sarah’s child, knowing that Emmy came as much for money as for love. But she washed away her guilt with an outpouring of love that, she hoped, would make up for Sarah’s sacrifice. ‘The moment I awake I long to see her and dote on her to a ridiculous degree.’ ‘I beg you will kiss the blot on the word immediately three lines back because it is her dear little finger that made it.’ Emily was ‘the pretty Emmy, the blessed lovely Emmy.’ ‘She loves dancing … and has a notion of turning her little arms over her head as I have taught her. You would laugh at seeing what an old fool I am when by ourselves, dancing with her till I’m out of breath.’

Emily Napier gave Louisa a new emotional focus. She felt, at the age of forty-one, like a first-time mother and wanted both her sisters to see her with her ‘treasure’ as she called Emmy. ‘I quite long that my sister Leinster should see her,’ she wrote to Sarah soon after Emmy arrived, and when the rest of the Napier family accepted her invitation to come to Castletown she was overjoyed.

So began a short, relatively settled period of domestic concerns. Emily and Sarah, bringing up their second families, shared with Louisa a late motherhood. At ages when their contemporaries were saying goodbye to children who were leaving for matrimony or a separate life, they were worrying together over new teeth and inoculation. Emily settled back happily into her old position as the Lennox matriarch. If not queen of Ireland she was still queen of her own family. When Sarah arrived at Castletown in 1785, Emily was nearly fifty-four. She was a grandmother many times over, of both legitimate and illegitimate children. In the eyes of her husband and family she was still a beautiful woman. The soft fashions of
the 1780s, with their plain gowns, bright sashes and billowing neckerchiefs, suited her ample form. Sore eyes (alleviated by the application of leeches) bothered her, she complained of a rheumatic leg and her periods were now troublesome. But she had, as she said later, a constitution of iron and, despite her aversion to exercise, she had fewer ailments than Sarah, who was fourteen years her junior. She was passionately in love with her husband. When Ogilvie went to London in 1782, she wrote to him, ‘Dr Mimi was in bed an hour with me this morning and so like you! Guess if I kissed and mumbled her, dear little thing.’