Aristocrats (8 page)

Emily was the sibling Caroline knew best and in whom she had confided during the later stages of her courtship with Fox. Emily was also her parents’ favourite. When she was a baby some of her bones were misaligned and she was laced in a ‘swing’ to let them fall free. This frailty increased her parents’ adoration. She was a precocious child. ‘Em is admirable but horribly naughty,’ the Duchess of Richmond wrote with doting indulgence when Emily was a few years old. ‘I
saw her go to bed last night and asked her if the bed was a good one. She told me “c’est ce qu’on apelle en Englois comfortable” [
sic
] I dote on her as much as you do.’ Elsewhere Emily’s status as favourite was confirmed. ‘Pray get the better of Emily if you can,’ the Duchess wrote. ‘I believe its very necessary she should be here for me to punish her, for you spoil her.’

In the autumn of 1746 Emily was approaching her fifteenth birthday. Fairer than Caroline, she had thick, curling brown hair, light-blue eyes (although they were sometimes wrongly painted grey by lazy portraitists) and her sister’s small mouth that turned provocatively up at the ends. She was tall and well proportioned and, if the Earl of Kildare’s partiality is to be believed, had beautiful legs. Her beauty, though, owed as much to manner as to features. Joshua Reynolds said she had ‘a sweetness of expression’ that was difficult for a painter to capture. To this charm were added a mental liveliness and a physical langour which called simultaneously for attention and pampering. Emily secured the indulgence of her friends and admirers by flirtatious demands, extravagant gestures and judicious apology if she overstepped the mark.

Emily was born in 1731 and was eight years younger than Caroline. When she was four, Charles, Earl of March, was born, and two years later the thankful Duchess produced another boy, Lord George Lennox. The family name and line was thereby secured and the second Duke and his wife were able to relax and enjoy their family. The atmosphere of sickness, death and anxiety that Caroline knew so well was dissipated as Emily grew up and she was entirely free from the sense of guilt and foreboding which haunted her sister. Her beauty and the obvious ease with which she manipulated her father and her two younger brothers endowed her with a lifelong sense of entitlement. Emily was complacent about others’ feelings for her when she was young. ‘I love to be doted upon vastly,’ she wrote in her twenties and accepted devotion and adoration as her due. Yet while she never
doubted her own powers of attraction, Emily was well aware of others’ needs and dispositions. Caroline, she knew, was slightly censorious about vanity, regretting that she had ‘more than a common share of that foible’. So Emily made her happy with loving flattery, writing on Caroline’s thirtieth birthday, ‘I think you are grown handsomer, younger and cheerfuller within these two years than ever I remember you, so pray don’t be affected and say you are old.’ Emily teased Henry Fox and was excited by his enjoyment of her company. ‘I love his villainous countenance,’ she wrote to her sister. To Fox himself she wrote high-spiritedly in 1756, ‘I am glad your brother is made an Earl. He is a sweet man, worth a thousand of you; much better humoured, ten thousand times better bred, much livelier, and I believe full as clever, only that you have a cunning, black, devilish countenance and he has a cheerful, pleasant one; you are an ambitious vain toad and he likes to live quietly in the country.’

Sexy abuse of this sort was only suited to a man like Fox who was confident of his charm and did not stand on his dignity. Towards her husband Emily had necessarily to behave very differently but she used the same manipulative skills and displayed a similar confidence about her relationships. When she was young Emily exuded a delight in herself that rubbed off on other people. She surrounded herself with people, Caroline noticed, and amongst them she always had a few especially favoured female friends. With one she wrote poetry, as she had done with Caroline at Goodwood; with another she read and sewed and chatted. A dead horse gave Emily and Lady Drogheda, an intimate friend in the years after her marriage, a whole day of fun. She reported their enjoyment to Caroline with teenage exuberance: ‘her verses are quite in our way and she and I writ poetry to one another all day long when she was here. Lord Kildare, who was in great grief (about the dead horse) begged they might be very serious and melancholy and suitable to such a subject, which accordingly they were, and I send them to Mr. Fox to show
him I excel equally in the sublime as in the comical style. But my poetical genius can attain any height, nothing is either too high or too low for it.’

Emily liked women friends for company and service, admitting, ‘as I … am lazy it is useful to have somebody to do a thousand little matters for me and give the many little assistances such as calling, fetching, ringing. All this you will say is very selfish and I allow it.’ Of a friend who nearly died Emily wrote in the same vein to the Earl of Kildare: ‘What should I have done without her? … that loves one as she does, that enters with such warmth into everything that interests one, all one’s little views of pleasure, profit or ambition, in short one that has such a heart?’ In her old age she looked severely upon her own self indulgence, writing, ‘every young person should be brought up to be helpful; I never was,’ but her youthful habits lasted her a lifetime.

Emily did not stand on ceremony. She was less worried than Caroline about behaviour and etiquette, happy to receive friends in informal clothes or undress. ‘Colonel Sandford came here yesterday morning,’ she wrote to her husband while she was confined after childbirth, ‘I was in bed, but did not scruple seeing him.’ Nor did she worry too much about social convention, within the limits peculiar to Protestant life in Ireland. From the countryside outside Dublin she wrote to her husband, ‘Think how pleasantly Mrs. Crofton and Mrs. Crosbie surprised me Sunday night at nine o’clock. They were to go out and take the air after dinner together. One proposed coming here, the other assented and away they drove. They supped here, lay here and went away after breakfast again.’ Caroline said, ‘I should be miserable at the thoughts of a great many people in the house with me,’ but admitted, ‘I’m more personne d’habitude than you are.’

Caroline was also more thoughtful. Emily, at the time of her marriage, was still an ‘engaging girl’ as Caroline called her, only just out of the schoolroom. She filled her time with reading rather than dreary thoughts. ‘I love to see everything
new that comes out, either pretty or foolish,’ she wrote, and had a standing order with the London bookseller Mrs Dunoyer for ‘all the new books’. Like Caroline, she used books as an outlet for sentiment; she ‘perfectly sobbed’ at reading Murphy’s play
The Orphan of China
when it came out, and declared that she would be ‘killed’ if she saw it acted on the stage. At some point she started reading political pamphlets as well as the novels, poetry and plays that were her staple fare. Emily also demanded novelty of other kinds, developing an expensive taste in furnishings, clothes of all sorts, buckles and jewels set in the latest styles, new games of cards.

As Caroline realised, Emily was still a child when she married, still searching for a comfortable personality to inhabit. She changed the way she signed her letters, she gave herself nicknames – her favourite being Patsy – and experimented with different sorts of handwriting. Her husband, in contrast, was already feeling all of his twenty-five years. His life was burdened with the heavy weight of an ancient dynasty and he took his familial duties tremendously seriously.

By the eighteenth century the Fitzgeralds, or Geraldines as they were popularly known, had an identity that was both august and schizophrenic. They were, as Kildare said, the oldest surviving and thus the ‘first’ peers of Ireland. By virtue of their long residence there and the marriage alliances they had contracted amongst the pre-Norman inhabitants, the Fitzgeralds regarded themselves as Irish. But by the mid-eighteenth century they were sufficiently powerful amongst the Protestants – particularly those in and around Dublin, whose families may have been there for two hundred years – to have become figureheads for Irish Protestant nationalism which was fundamentally at odds with the interests and rights of the Gaelic and Catholic Irish. Protestants, many of them in commerce and the professions, tended to advance their claims to the exclusion of all other groups. They were hostile to any whiff of emancipation for Catholics and Dissenters and were
suspicious of any dealings by the Westminster government that might lessen their autonomy or control over national finances.

Kildare was very rich, with an estate that in 1820 was counted as 67,000 acres valued at £46,000. Low-lying fertile land spreading westwards from Dublin into the green heart of the country formed most of his estate. Fields of rippling wheat, scythed by cheap Irish labour for export to the lucrative English market, herds of milk cows and steers and rows of root vegetables represented high yields for tenant farmers and high rents for landowners. While England’s hungry population was soaring, Ireland had yet to see the explosion that would make for so much misery in the future; Ireland was, in mid-century, in the full flush of a temporary prosperity that reached its zenith in the Napoleonic wars and crashed spectacularly thereafter. When he proposed to Emily, Kildare had a rent-roll of getting on for £15,000 a year and virtually unlimited credit with Dublin’s bankers.

Kildare was an important figure in Irish political life because he controlled a large block of MPs in the Irish House of Commons. He was determined to use this influence, writing bluntly to Fox that he wanted, ‘to be, if I can, of the first consequence here’. But his dynastic prominence carried him further in Irish politics than his own political talents. Confined to a totemic role as a figurehead of Protestant nationalism he might have been successful. But he lacked the acumen and flexibility that might have allowed him to make something of the active political role that he sought. Believing that the man of honour enumerated his grievances plainly and that plain justice would mitigate them, he appeared stubborn and unsubtle in the political arena. If officials side-stepped his demands, Kildare responded by asserting rank and taking the matter up with a higher authority, travelling, if necessary, as far as the King himself, and making enemies all the way up. He failed to understand that for men like Fox politics was a profession more than a dynastic responsibility and it was a
profession which had increasingly complicated, subtle and devious rules of its own.

In and around Dublin, Kildare could set the social pace. In 1745 he chose a suburban site south of the Liffey for a grand new town house. It was not an area favoured by the nobility or by Dublin’s rich merchants, but Kildare declared that ‘they will follow me wherever I go’. Speculators, professionals and newly rich gentlemen poured across the river after him, sanctioned by nobility and credit to found a new fashionable centre for the city which gradually eclipsed the north side. In London Kildare was a much more uncertain figure. He had no lands in England and no English title that would give him social standing and a seat in the Lords. His wealth was to a large degree offset by his Irishness, because Ireland was already a focus for English anxieties about change and difference and colonialism. The Duke of Richmond for one made no distinctions among the heterogeneous population of Ireland, even though he himself had had Irish lands, preferring, in the interests of satirical prejudice, to lump them all together. The Duke declared, after Emily had a son, that his dark-headed hunter had more sense than any ‘white Irish heads’ and was slow to congratulate his daughter, prompting Caroline to write tartly (though without disagreeing), ‘surely reflections on the Irish stupidity is not so civil in his Grace?’ Prejudice of the same sort also dominated the Duchess’s response to Kildare’s proposal for Emily, the more so since she worked hard at forgetting the fact that she herself was of Irish extraction.

For both the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, Ireland was a country far more remote from their actual and imagined experience than continental Europe. Into this imaginary void they now tried to place their daughter; all they could conjure up were bogs, stupidity and the theatricality for which Irish actors, impresarios and playwrights were already famous in London. When Kildare first proposed in the summer of 1745 they baulked at the proposal on the grounds that Emily was still too young to know what she wanted or what marriage
meant. Stubborn persistence kept Kildare determined and waiting. When the Duke could no longer put Kildare off, and unable to pass on a definite refusal from Emily herself, he drove a hard bargain. Emily came only with the promise of £10,000 when her parents died and the Duke demanded a handsome annuity or jointure for her in the event of Kildare’s death. Richmond knew that Kildare was after the political rather than the financial advantage that went along with the bride and that his own part of the bargain would be to honour the political obligations that marital alliance brought with it. Especially galling was the knowledge that Fox, rising fast up the political ladder in the chaos after Walpole’s fall, was equally the target of Kildare’s overtures.

Knowing that politics played such a large part in Kildare’s proposal contributed to the Duke’s coolness. He also wanted Emily close by. Having lost one daughter to Fox, the Duke was reluctant to lose another to Ireland. But the Duchess was the real stumbling block, as Caroline had realised when she wrote to Henry from Bath. The Duchess was embarrassed about her Irish blood and the last thing she wanted was a connection which would perpetually remind her of it. Emily realised that her mother was hostile to Kildare, although at the age of fourteen she was uneducated in the anxieties of colonial identity. Ten years later she saw a parallel to her own case in another romance. ‘Sir James Lowther has desired Mr Fox to propose him for Lady Betty Spencer. He is violently in love, poor man, and they don’t behave quite well to him and are for putting it off two years … It is a vast match for her, but the Duchess is odd about it, the Duke would be reasonable enough if it was not for her, and, in short, the whole thing is just a second part of the affair between you and I, which makes me interest myself prodigiously about it.’