Vindication (12 page)

Cut off from friends and family affections, she picked up her pen–and found some release. Alone at night beside her fire, listening to the wind or lifting her eyes to the hills, she would dash down letters where she freed herself to say what she saw and heard. Her position was not unlike that of a spy–an unwilling but penetrating spy–who infiltrates the closed world of the enemy. During her first weeks at the castle she would have taken in the facts of its history and inhabitants, and assessed what she was up against at the start of a campaign to draw the daughters of the enemy into her camp.

 

A certain John King, born in Staffordshire, had made his way to Ireland during the reign of Elizabeth, and there married Catherine Drury, grandniece of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, in 1578. In return for military services, Elizabeth knighted him and granted the lease of Boyle Abbey in the county of Roscommon. By the end of the sixteenth century Elizabethan entrepreneurs like John King made up less than two per cent of what was to them a strangely ‘unreadable' population, a bardic culture which continued to possess its land in its poetic and legendary aspect. During the reign of James I, Sir John acquired so much land that for nearly three hundred years the Kings would remain amongst the wealthiest and most influential of the Protestant families. He settled in Dublin, and fathered six sons and three daughters. His fourth son, Edward, was Milton's friend at Christ's College, Cambridge–Milton wrote his great elegy
Lycidas
after Edward King was drowned in the Irish Sea in 1638 at the age of twenty-five. He was the brother of Margaret King's great-great-great-grandfather.

During the curtailed reign of James II (1685–8), the Catholic King granted power to the Catholics in Ireland. The Protestants became uneasy, and remained so even after Catholic forces were overthrown at the battle of the Boyne in 1690. That victory began the ‘long' eighteenth century in Ireland. Its separate Parliament, entirely Protestant, took a harder line against the Catholic majority than did the English Parliament. There were laws excluding Catholics from the vote and intermarriage, as well as some very petty and unenforceable laws: a Catholic, for instance, might not own a horse worth more than £5.

Meanwhile, the Protestant establishment became increasingly rich in land, and none richer than the forebears of Mary Wollstonecraft's employers. In 1658 John King's grandson, another John King, married an orphaned child-heiress, Catharine Fenton. Another calculating marriage took place a century later: on 5 December 1769, when sixteen-year-old Robert King, heir of the 1st Earl of Kingston, married his fifteen-year-old cousin Caroline FitzGerald, the richest heiress in Ireland,
*
their combined estates made them the greatest landowners in the country. Caroline's Mitchelstown estate of 100,000 acres, extending from North Cork into the counties of Limerick, Tipperary and even Kerry in the west, brought in £42,000 in rents a year (worth approximately £2 million today). Those whose families had owned land for generations
felt
Irish, yet to the Catholic majority–amounting to seventy-five per cent of the population–they remained English, colonisers who copied English manners, furnishings and clothes, and sent their sons to English schools.

Robert King, Viscount Kingsborough, had only recently left Eton when he married. The month before, in November 1769, his father the Earl had engaged an Eton master, John Tickell, to continue his son's interrupted education. These actions bear on another curious fact: the family fudged the birth dates of the couple's first two children. Burke's
Peerage
gives 8 April 1771 as birth date of their eldest child, George. The year has to be wrong, because a letter from Robert to his father on 7 July of that year reveals that Caroline was about to give birth to their second child. This was Margaret, named after Caroline's dead mother. It was not uncommon for the nobility to have records altered. If George's birth date was shifted to one year later, Margaret's had to be shifted accordingly to 1772.

Caroline combined delicate features with two extravagant beauties: her large, slanted eyes, rather wide apart, with creamy lids, and a tremendous
head of hair that needed no fashionable props. In a portrait she has twined ribbons through two long curls that hang down from her unpowdered pompadour. She and Robert King were intended for each other: if, on the strength of this, Robert seduced Caroline and she was pregnant, a hasty marriage would have been the only solution to the birth of George some four months later. This would fit the fact that the bridegroom's schooling was cut short. It was not customary for boys to leave Eton at sixteen to be married. If these are signs of a cover-up, another fact would fit too, for George was born away from home in the quiet village of Chelsea, at a distance from the centre of London.

Whatever the truth, this marriage had a bad start. To the Earl, Caroline mattered only on three counts: she was moneyed, she was pretty, and she was there to ‘breed'. Though she bore three children in four and a half years of marriage, when there came a lull, the Earl wondered at the cause of her ‘not having children as fast as at first we had reason to expect'. The cause is not far to seek: Caroline and Robert did not get on.

As Mary Wollstonecraft would later grant, Caroline King was fundamentally well meaning in her unhappy situation. She had lost her mother at the age of nine; at seventeen she was already a mother of two, having been transplanted at fifteen into her husband's family who expected her to ‘breed' whether she was loved or not. After Margaret's birth Caroline did not conceive for eighteen months, which could mean that she refused her husband so long as she had to live with his parents.

At length, Robert agreed to live in London. There, Caroline soon conceived again, and her husband reassured his father they'd stopped rowing since they left: ‘You very well know how unhappy Caroline & I were when we were with you.' The Earl replied that he had been so very shocked at their misery ‘that I have often wished the match had never taken place, but it was then too late & I kept my mind to myself. I am glad, at any rate, that mutual dislike has ceas'd, & I hope it may continue so.'

They returned to Ireland when Caroline came of age in 1775, and settled at Mitchelstown. Lord Kingsborough came back with a rage for building. The reconstruction of his wife's property was to occupy the rest of his life. When an English agriculturalist, Arthur Young, toured Ireland in 1776, he
had seen at Mitchelstown ‘the face of desolation'. The poor subsisted on potatoes and milk, as elsewhere, and the potato-driven soil had been exhausted and left to weeds all over the estate. Women weeded for no pay, and men would walk ten or twelve miles to a fair to sell a lamb for 3s 6d–a sure sign of poverty. Their cabins were made of mud and thatch with no chimney–Young's sketch shows smoke coming out of the entrance, the sole aperture, at the front. When Young became steward of the estate in 1777, he tried to persuade Kingsborough to do away with middlemen (the ‘gombeen men'), who exploited the peasants.

Young was defeated by a leading middleman, Colonel James Thornhill, who was related to Lady Kingsborough. By now she had been ill matched for ten years, with numerous children, though she was only twenty-five. Arthur Young, aged thirty-eight, was also unhappily married (to the sister of Fanny Burney's stepmother from Lynn in Norfolk). He amused Caroline with chess in the evenings, and Mrs Thornhill insinuated to Kingsborough that love was in the air. Young was dismissed, but his work remained. The estate was divided into agricultural fields, each with a name, including a Ghost's Field, while sheep, cattle and deer were farmed virtually up to the castle door.

Kingsborough has been praised for his building and planting. Certainly, he did well to establish schools, a library, a market square and a plantation of four hundred thousand mulberry trees for the production of silk which provided opportunities for employment and brought, for a time, a measure of prosperity to the peasants. But the layout had also a darker purpose. Since his lordship's wall had cut through the old main street, he threw up a new one at a distance, later named ‘George Street' after his godfather, the King. At one end is King's Square with its Georgian church; at the other stands another church which I assumed must be Catholic–but on closer inspection turned out to be Protestant. This means that whenever a tenant lifted his eyes in George Street he saw, planted in his path in either direction, the God of the landlord to whom he owed his family's subsistence. And looking north, he saw a road straight as logic sweeping through the new town, on through the centre of King's Square and up the rise to the ‘castle' at the top, encircled by its mortar wall. In
short, it's a power statement: a remade landscape spells out the Protestant Ascendancy. It speaks at once of arrogance, beauty, disciplined taste–and, lurking under a perfect order, a twitch of danger. Was it fear of an untamed populace going back to the days of old John King: elusive, slipping over their bogs, fluid in their arrangements, somehow uncontainable in the confusion of Elizabethan campaigns? Or was it the danger of insecure superiors who might forsake civility for the sword? In 1783 when Kingsborough stood for the Irish Parliament, his men fought numerous duels–no more than what was expected.

Kingsborough was also commanding colonel of the Protestant-led Volunteers, the Mitchelstown Independent Light Dragoons, formed in 1780 in fear of an American or French invasion. He paraded and drilled in a scarlet uniform with silver epaulettes. The Volunteer movement helped the Irish Parliament achieve legislation without British interference in 1782. In the mid-1780s Mary Wollstonecraft was seeing the Ascendancy at the apogee of its power before it began to be eroded by the impact of the French Revolution. Irish Georgians had what R. F. Foster has called a more ‘gamy' flavour than their English counterparts, more ferocious, more given to a ‘savagery of mind', amplified by the insecurity of their political position and ‘balked' nationality. Foster quotes Clonmell, a Lord Chief Justice, who thought ‘a civilized state of war is the safest and most agreeable that any gentleman, especially in
station
, can suppose himself in'. Mary was not to know that Lord Kingsborough's men had horse-whipped nine supporters of his opponent in the run-up to his parliamentary election. The violence resurfaced in 1797 when, as we shall see, Kingsborough shot a member of his family, and was intensified by the atrocities of the Viscount's heir, ‘Big George' (the elder of the boys who had failed to meet Mary Wollstonecraft at Eton), during the Irish Rising in 1798. The militia George took over from his father, the Mitchelstown Light Dragoons, was part of the notorious North Corks whose conduct has been described as ‘stupidity and cowardice in the face of danger; ferocity and outrage in the wake of victory'. George's portrait has been removed from the Provost's Lodge at Eton, and relegated to the art storeroom–not to be lost. It is, after all, a painting by Romney.

 

Though Mary Wollstonecraft did not witness acts of brutality, she was struck by a curious absence of sensibility amongst the inhabitants of the castle. Compassion, central to her teaching, was not part of their education. Girls, she observed, were harnessed to ‘
cart
loads' of history–this puzzled her rather more than it need puzzle us, for history until recently has been the story of dominant groups. To aggrandise families and augment power was the subliminal message of what girls of this class were put to read; it conditioned them to accept their fate. In their late teens they must assent to a marriage in which love had no part. Mrs FitzGerald's three daughters were, as their brother laughed to Mary, ‘just off to market'. She was astonished to find that Maria, Harriot and Margaret FitzGerald read no novels. This lack seemed to Mary to have left them devoid of the interior life of sensibility that led to genuine ‘refinement', not seen in manners alone. Nor had cartloads of history diminished their silliness.

The FitzGerald girls were also schooled in modern languages. They appear in Mary Wollstonecraft's first novel as girls whose ‘minds had received very little cultivation. They were taught French, Italian, and Spanish; English was their vulgar tongue. And what did they learn? Hamlet will tell you–words–words. But let me not forget that they squalled Italian songs in the true gusto. Without having any seeds sewn in their understanding, or the affections of the heart set to work, they were brought out of the nursery, or the place they were secluded in, to prevent their faces being common: like blazing stars, to captivate Lords.' There's a similar critique of the miseducation of girls in Jane Austen's errant Maria Bertram, who ‘had learned languages with facility and been taught to set a very high value upon her knowledge of history and chronology'. She makes a disastrous marriage (with parental assent) to a wealthy fool.

It was not customary to send daughters away to school if a family could afford a governess at home. Since a girl's purpose in life was to marry to advantage and ‘breed' as many male heirs as possible, she was given an education in manners and the sort of accomplishments–music and modern languages–that would show well in the marriage market. Wollstonecraft was, as we know, unfit for such training as well as being
ideologically opposed to it, and this added uneasiness to dislike when Lady Kingsborough made her descents on the schoolroom.

As a governess with advanced views on the necessity for women's education, Wollstonecraft recognised at once that the eldest daughter, Margaret, had ‘a wonderful capacity but she has such a multiplicity of employments it has not room to expand itself–and in all probability will be lost in a heap of rubbish miss-called accomplishments. I grieved at being obliged to continue so wrong a system.' Lady Kingsborough ruled the girl ‘with a rod of iron', while, in Mary's opinion, ‘tenderness would lead her any where'. Margaret later confirmed the ‘baneful effects' of ‘unkindness & tyranny', and her relief to be treated with respect. Mary planned to expand Margaret's knowledge by taking her to visit ‘the poor cabbins'. But she was careful, at first, to placate her mother.