Aristocrats (52 page)

Relentlessly the nation pulled itself into the vortex. Government actions – making oath-taking a capital offence, pardoning repressive magistrates, and partially suspending
habeas corpus
at the end of 1796 – enraged radicals but were denounced by fierce loyalists as too weak. Opposition and sectarianism grew. There were rumours of French invasion plans and a gradual mobilisation of volunteers and militias. Rumour prompted action which fuelled rumour and prompted fear and interrogation. Was the secret-society member a government spy? Was the housekeeper loyal to her mistress, and was the mistress of the same mind as the master? Was the master the tool of Dublin Castle and was the Castle frustrating or co-operating with Westminster? Was Westminster a friend to loyal Catholics or secretly committed to Protestant ascendancy? In the maelstrom of fear and speculation, some individuals panicked; others took a hard line, stuck to it and lost their heads. As rebellion began the endless
remaking that constituted the nation’s sense of itself was remorselessly speeded up. By the time the Act of Union was signed, a new nation had emerged, not only constitutionally but narratively as well, and it had a new martyrology to add to its myths of itself.

From 1795 onwards opposition groups began arming themselves. Pikes were the simplest weapons. Smiths forged the heads and parties of men went out at night to fell young trees for the handles. Other arms were commandeered by insurgents and piled in secret caches. In July, a hundred and fifty Defenders marched up to Sarah’s house in Celbridge. Their leaders fired shots at the upper windows and then demanded arms. Sarah was away and her housekeeper, armed with one of Napier’s pistols, refused them entry. The whole band then trudged disconsolately away. Louisa feared that Castletown, where Napier’s weapons were hurriedly secreted, would be the next target of the ‘rioters’ as she called them. Conolly and Napier, like Sarah, were away. Left alone, Louisa ruminated upon and then panicked about an attack on the house. She ordered every gun in Castletown to be primed and loaded and put the house into a ‘state of defence’. Then she went into Celbridge, driving the length of the main street from Castletown’s gates to Sarah’s house at the other end. She went down side streets and alleys and knocked on many doors. ‘I went myself to every house,’ she explained to her brother, ‘spoke to every poor person to explain the nature of this mischievous manner of proceeding, entreated them to desist and repose some confidence in two such friends as Mr. Conolly and myself, who never had nor would ever deceive them.’ But Louisa was already far from neutral. She wanted the people of Celbridge to commit themselves to her and as she went she made a list of those prepared to do so. ‘I have all their names down and of course shall be more likely to find out our strength if anything happens. The housekeepers seemed vastly pleased at this sort of association that I have set on foot
and I think it can’t do any harm and may do good.’ Louisa’s list was bound to arouse the suspicion of those who already saw her in a double light, as both the apotheosis of liberal paternalism and a symbol of the repressive regime. Besides, a list compiled while Defenders melted away down the town’s alleys was meaningless. Those who might be loyal to the Conollys or the government feared reprisals if the Defenders knew it. Those who had no intention of staying loyal might sign for cover or refuse to sign in case they were accused of double-dealing by their colleagues.

In the end Louisa had no need to use her list. The Defenders disappeared with their rifles and pikes and hid themselves in their daily occupations. Sarah’s sons, who had enjoyed the military spectacle on their front lawn, returned to their schooling. At Castletown, Louisa put the arms away, prepared for the harvest and celebrated Emily Napier’s birthday. Beyond Carton, on his small estate of Kilrush, Lord Edward Fitzgerald settled down for the summer with his young wife Pamela. By this time, Lord Edward had left the Irish Parliament. He defiantly hung a portrait of Tom Paine over the mantelpiece in his sitting-room at Kilrush and began to associate with aristocratic radicals like Arthur O’Connor and United Irishmen like the Sheares brothers, all of whom had been in Paris in 1792.

As long as the United Irish was a legal organisation, Lord Edward could associate with United Irishmen without formally belonging to the movement. But the organisation was forced underground in 1794 and Lord Edward eventually followed, dampening family anxiety as best he could. He joined at the beginning of 1796 and by that summer was in Hamburg and Switzerland with O’Connor, pressing the French to send an invasion force to Ireland that would begin an Irish revolution.

From Hamburg and Switzerland Edward sent Emily in London a series of letters which concentrated on the old themes of their correspondence: his love for her, hers for him,
and their enjoyment of literature and the natural world. But his description of Switzerland was vague, more a sop to government censors than to his mother, who knew her son’s views and probably the purpose of his mission too. ‘I had a very pleasant tour, am in raptures with Switzerland. I left my friend O’Connor in Switzerland taking another tour. There never were two persons who more thoroughly admired Switzerland than we did. He saw it with the Rousseau enthusiasm. He is as fond of Rousseau as I am, so you may conceive how we enjoyed our journey.’

This concoction, with its repetitions and flat descriptions was not enough to set Emily’s mind at rest. Lord Edward’s references to Rousseau, who had written a constitution for the republican Swiss, were a broad hint that he was deep in political activities. She began to expect bad news. Worry spoiled the pleasure of Lord Edward’s return from Hamburg and the company of his son ‘little Eddy’ whom Edward had given to his mother to look after. ‘My poor anxious mind is ever looking forward to some distress,’ Emily wrote to her daughter Lucy on 8 October 1796. After Lord Edward’s return from the Continent, Emily rarely wrote about Ireland to anyone, and referred to her son’s politics as ‘a certain subject’, something it was too painful, and unwise, to name. From 1792, Lord Edward must have known his letters would be opened by government officials and checked for seditious content. By the mid-1790s Emily and Sarah, too, suspected that they had a circle of readers wider than the family. Sarah continued to be hopelessly indiscreet, making no concessions to the officials reading her scribbled letters in the central Dublin Post Office. But she reminded Lucy Fitzgerald that opinions expressed in letters were not private matters; on the contrary, they were brought into the public domain by the zealous action of government censors.

Now that Lord Edward was committing treason by plotting the downfall of the government, Emily’s enjoyment of her son’s republicanism was at an end. She tried without success to talk him out of it. On 12 November she wrote to her
daughter, who had joined Lord Edward at Kilrush (again without explicitly mentioning politics), ‘and so my sweet Lucy, you have had conversations with that angel Edward! I can easily believe you might say many things that might have an effect and do good, as it is a subject you have read a good deal about, considered well, and your own good strong judgment would assist you. I too have seen the dear precious drop fall down that dear cheek, but that is when the heart feels the distresses of others. To work upon those feelings only makes him feel wretched, but it does not remove the prejudice.’

Emily saw disaster ahead. Even as she hoped against hope that her son would abandon his revolutionary plans, she began to create a heroic version of him in her own mind, an image of her son that would withstand any battering it might receive if he were caught and unmasked. Creating a hero of her son prepared her for cataclysm. ‘I find my mind much less weak than I thought it would be,’ she wrote to Lucy a few weeks later, adding, ‘please tell Eddy so and press him to your heart for me.’

Throughout 1796 Lord Edward put a lighthearted face on to his radicalism, content that it should appear as patriotic posturing that would annoy rather than threaten the authorities. Lucy Fitzgerald, who described his capers in her diary, found meetings with radicals a source of sexual excitement and ‘democracy’ itself an aphrodisiac. While the United leaders planned rebellion, she nurtured an infatuation for Arthur O’Connor. ‘Dec 13. We had a dance in the evening. Our company was Cummins and the butcher’s daughters. I danced with Arthur [O’Connor]. We danced a great many Irish jigs. Ed. is a great hand at them.’ ‘Mar 23 [1797]. We had a visit from Mr. Henry and Mr. Leeson. They are both Democrats. I gave Mr. Henry a green cravat and Pamela Mr. Leeson, and we made them ride home in them.’ ‘Apl. 18. We went to town for a ball at Lady Clare’s I had my hair turned close up, was reckoned democratic, and was not danced with.’

As the months passed, political events dwarfed such gestures.
After an abortive French naval expedition in December 1796 and outbreaks of violence across the country, Camden, the Lord Lieutenant, moved against the United Irish leadership. By June 1797 most of the Ulster leaders were behind bars. Papers stolen by informers in Ulster incriminated other leading radicals, Lord Edward Fitzgerald amongst them. Emily learned of this in London at the end of January 1797. The embarrassed government offered Lord Edward a discreet and safe passage out of the country soon afterwards, but he refused to take it.

Like many mothers, sisters and wives caught up in the rebellion, Emily could now only wait, scan the newspapers and long for her son’s safety. Despite having a brother in the British Cabinet and a son prominent in the Irish peerage, Emily was far away in London, cut off from Ireland both by distance and the censor’s pencil. Her helplessness made her fatalistic; after January 1797 she gave up hoping for the best and prepared to think of Edward as a martyr. She cherished little Eddy, who had stayed with her in London, as an image of his father, and she began a collection of relics. ‘Yes, that dear lock so lately growing on Eddy’s precious head is a very acceptable present,’ she wrote to her daughter Lucy. ‘I put it in my bosom, after dear little Eddy had kissed it a thousand times. “Papa’s hair, Eddy’s own Papa’s hair!” I really believe he understands it all, pretty love.’

In May 1797 the harbingers of rebellion were discovered at Castletown and Celbridge: servants suspected of being United Irishmen and members of a party who had been breaking into houses in the neighbourhood and seizing arms. ‘
Our
footman and twelve Castletown servants and workmen have been taken up as housebreakers and United Irishmen,’ Sarah told Susan. Sarah, unlike Emily, was on the spot. She could see that for the moment these ramshackle revolutionaries posed no threat to the political order and she responded to the news with a detachment that continued throughout the rebellion. Her anger was reserved for the Dublin administration
whose ‘
real
and
manifest
cruelties and oppressions’ she saw as the cause of disaster. Disaffection was the government’s fault, she said. The mass of the population turned to a few Republicans for help only because neither the government nor the ‘supine’ opposition had offered any hope of emancipation and reform of the penal laws. Rebellion was wrong, she concluded, but explicable; yet Republicanism was abhorrent. Despite their cults of Napoleon and Caesar the Napiers described themselves as staunch adherents to the settlement of 1688 and advocated government by a compact between King, Lords and Commons. However much they demanded a limited role for the monarch and however much they railed against George III, they remained monarchists, opposed to ‘democratic’ or Republican movements.

Sarah’s coolness in the face of rebellion came partly from her political assessment, partly from her sense of being an outsider. She believed that the population was overwhelmingly loyal and that the ‘great weight of Monarchists’ would mean that rebellion was localised and insignificant. She had little to fear she said. She and Napier had little to lose either: no income from Irish land, no government offices or estates. Sarah waited for the rebellion with a clear conscience and the
sangfroid
she believed appropriate in a military wife.

Louisa reacted to the arrests of the Castletown workmen with anything but detachment. She had developed a Manichaean attitude towards the local people, believing that those who were not with her were against her and persistently confusing disaffection towards Dublin and Westminster with disloyalty towards herself. Moreover, she asserted that because she had consistently set politics and religion aside in her dealings with her tenants, so they should now do the same and see her as an individual rather than a representative of a government she did not support. She explained later why the arrests upset her. ‘My feeling so much as I did arose from the very great mortification I felt in having spent near 40 years (in what I considered a laudable pursuit) in vain. After having
shown the greatest goodwill to the different classes around me, without ever once having been conscious of a moment’s pride or severity towards them, and not even suffering my amusements to be independent of their advantages, I had flattered myself with the hope of possessing their friendship and confidence and then when ill advisers came to them with new proposals, that they would at least have consulted me before they engaged in so deep a business.’

When the contract of paternalism was shattered, Louisa had no way to describe her servants except as hostile or faithful. Equally, she had no other way to frame her own position, reasoning that hostility to the government meant sympathy for the rebels. So with fractured logic, Louisa put herself in the government camp, ‘against’ the disaffected, preferring not to see shades of loyalty or alliances of expediency. For the previous forty years she had thought of herself as Irish – ‘we Paddy’s’ she used to say, or ‘we Irish’. Her failure to understand or stand aside from definition by opposition meant that by 1798 she had pushed herself into saying ‘we’ and meaning the Irish government.

So for Louisa, 1798 represented a crisis of self-definition. She was temperamentally unable to write, as the Napiers did, ‘
we
have never in word, thought or deed, contributed to the misfortune of this ill-fated country and sympathising in the distress of others is our only misfortune individually.’ In other ways, too, Louisa was connected to the existing social hierarchy. Conolly’s enormous income came mostly from Irish lands (lands which, rumour hinted, might be passed to Catholics or Frenchmen in a successful revolution); and there was Castletown, its park and comforts. ‘I am obliged to say
us
now,’ Louisa wrote to her brother in June 1798, ‘for although Mr. Conolly has ever opposed the votes of the government, he will stand by any existing government rather than none.’ Louisa recognised the inadequacy of her own taxonomy; she was reluctant to stand by the government. But she could not think in any other way. After the rebellion she wanted desperately to forget what had happened and clung to
paternalism as her only refuge. She redoubled her charitable efforts and insisted upon displays of harmony between Catholics and Protestants, and rich and poor.