The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
EMILIA MARY, DUCHESS OF LEINSTER (1731-1814)[14]
“And the flower I held brightest of all that grew in soil or shall ever grow
Is rotting in the ground, and will spring no more to lift up my heart.”
—A Father’s Keen, by Patrick O’Hegarty.
“GREATER love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”—(John xv. 13). Ever since that June dawn, when its first sweet rays, stealing through the bars of the prison window in Newgate, fell on the form that lay rigid and still on the prison bed, we know what was “the greatest love” in Lord Edward’s life. For on that sad bed, still disordered from the tossings of his fever-racked limbs, still stained with his life-blood, there lay one who had died for Ireland.
By the supreme test, therefore, vouched for by the Supreme Lover, we know that the love of Ireland was Lord Edward’s “greatest love,” and that all other loves of his had to yield to its supremacy. But we can only measure the magnitude of his love for Ireland, if we have the measure of his other loves to set beside it. And so it falls out, that we have a particular need, if we would estimate Lord Edward aright, and would understand what he had to offer to Ireland, to know something of his other loves, and of those who inspired them. Above all we must know something of his extraordinary love for his mother.
His letters are full of it: “I am never so happy as when with you, dearest mother, you seem to make every distress lighter, and I bear everything better, and enjoy everything more when with you.” And again: “You cannot think how I feel to want you here. I dined and slept at Frescati the other day, Ogilvie and I, tête-à-tête. We talked a great deal of you. Though the place makes me melancholy, yet it gives one pleasant feelings. To be sure, the going to bed without wishing you a good night; the coming down in a morning, and not seeing you; the sauntering about in the fine sunshine, looking at your flowers and shrubs without you to lean upon one, was all very bad indeed. In settling my journey that evening, I determined to see you in my way, supposing you were even a thousand miles out of it.”
There is one letter to the “dearest of mothers,” in which he places his love for her above all else: “I assure you I miss you very, very much. I am not half so merry as I should be if you were here. I get tired of everything, and want to have you to go and talk to. You are, after all, what I love best in the world. I love you more than I think I do; but I will not give way to such thoughts, for it always makes me grave. I really made myself miserable for two days since I left you, by this sort of reflections; and in thinking over with myself what misfortunes I could bear, I found there was one I could not; but God bless you.”
Was it Lord Edward’s surpassing love for his mother, that made her, on her side, single him out among all her children to lavish her tenderness on; or did she recognise in his great capacity for love a heritage from her own nature which drew this son closer to her than any other child she had ever borne? It is certain that of her numerous children—they counted twenty-one in all—Lord Edward was his mother’s favourite, and was accepted as such by the rest of the family. Mr. Gerald Campbell thinks her very frankness in avowing her preference for him prevented any jealousy among the others. Among the seventy or eighty letters of the Duchess to her daughters and others which Mr. Campbell examined before writing his charming book, “Edward and Pamela Fitzgerald,” there is hardly one, he tells us, “in which she does not express her exceeding love for him above all the rest.” He quotes: “Dear, dear Eddy! How constantly he is in my thoughts!” “In Edward nothing surprises me, dear angel; he has always loved me in an uncommon degree from childhood.” “I do not pretend to say that Dearest Angel Edward is not the first object: you have all been used to allow me that indulgence of partiality to him, and none of you, I believe, blame me for it, or see my excessive attachment to that Dear Angel with a jealous eye.” The truth is that Lord Edward had to an extraordinary degree, the gift, so often accorded as a birthright to persons with a great work to do in the world, of winning hearts. And probably his own brothers and sisters were as ready to succumb to his magnetism as the rest of the world.
It would not be surprising if Lord Edward inherited his power of winning hearts, as well as his capacity for love, from his fascinating mother, and she, in her turn, wielded it in virtue of her Stuart blood. For she was the great-granddaughter of Charles II and the beautiful Louise de Kérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. Of the numerous daughters of her father and mother, the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, four grew to womanhood, and of these Lady Emilia Mary was the second. All four were famous for their great beauty and charm; and all four have played a notable part in history. Lady Caroline, who married Stephen Fox, afterwards Lord Holland, was the mother of the brilliant statesman, Charles James Fox. Lady Louisa married Mr. Connolly, of Castletown. Lady Sarah, some years after the unfortunate termination of her first marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury, married Colonel Napier and became the mother of many distinguished soldier sons, including Sir William Napier, the historian of the Peninsular Wars, and Sir Charles Napier, the conqueror of Scinde.
I do not know why the novelists who have found in the life romance of the four beautiful Lennox girls such a wealth of material should have passed over the love-story of their parents. It is, if possible, more romantic than any of them. The story is told by their grandson, Mr. Henry Napier, and published in the introduction to the “Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox” (pp. 85-87), his mother:
“My grandfather, the second Duke of Richmond, was one of the Lords of the Bedchamber to King George the Second, who then resided at Kensington Palace. He had been, as was the custom in those days, married while yet a boy to Lady Sarah Cadogan.... This marriage was made to cancel a gambling debt, the young people’s consent having been the last thing thought of; the Earl of March[15] was sent for from school, and the young lady from her nursery, a clergyman was in attendance, and they were told they were immediately to become man and wife! The young lady is not reported to have uttered a word; the gentleman exclaimed, ‘They surely are not going to marry me to that dowdy!’ The ceremony, however, took place; a postchaise was ready at the door, and Lord March was instantly packed off with his tutor to make the ‘grand tour,’ while his young wife was returned to the care of her mother, a Dutch woman, daughter of William Munster, Counsellor of Holland. After some years spent abroad Lord March returned, a well-educated handsome young man, but with no very agreeable recollections of his wife. Wherefore, instead of at once seeking his own home, he went directly to the Opera or Theatre, where he amused himself between the acts in examining the company. He had not long been occupied in this manner when a very young and beautiful woman more especially struck his fancy, and turning to a gentleman beside him he asked who she was. ‘You must be a stranger in London,’ replied the gentleman, ‘not to know the toast of the town, the beautiful Lady March.’ Agreeably surprised at this intelligence, Lord March proceeded to the box, announced himself, and claimed his bride—the very dowdy whom he had so scornfully rejected some years before, but with whom he afterwards lived so happily that she died of a broken heart within the year of his decease, which took place in Godalming, in Surrey, in August, 1750, when my mother was only five years and a few months old.”
EMILY, COUNTESS OF KILDARE
The Mother of Lord Edward Fitzgerald
The conjugal affection which ever afterwards united the hero and heroine of this pretty romance receives emphatic testimony from Horace Walpole. In the gossip he gathers up for his correspondents their names figure frequently; and while he jests maliciously about the Duke’s “pride and Stuartism,” and the Duchess’s “grandeur,” he is an enthusiastic admirer of her Grace’s beauty, and his cynicism is not proof against the spectacle of her love for her husband, and her devotion to her children. Like her daughter, the Duchess of Leinster, she had an extraordinarily large family—twenty-six, as we learn from Horace Walpole[16]—but as was so often the case in these enormous eighteenth-century families—but a small proportion of them survived their infancy. We have a pretty picture of the Duchess and her husband (“who sat by his wife all night kissing her hand”) at the ball given by “long Sir Thomas Robinson” for “the Duke’s little girl,” Lady Caroline Lennox, in October, 1741. “The beauties,” he informs his Florentine correspondent, Sir Horace Mann, “were the Duke of Richmond’s two daughters,[17] and their mother, still handsomer than they.” At the Duchess of Norfolk’s great “masquerade” of February 17th, 1742, to which Royalty went, ablaze with diamonds, and where “quantities of pretty Vandykes, and all kinds of old pictures walked out of their frames,” the “two finest and most charming masks,” in Mr. Walpole’s opinion, “were their Graces of Richmond, like Henry the Eighth and Jane Seymour, excessively rich, and both so handsome!”[18]
Owing to their father’s position at Court, the little Lennox girls were well known to the old king, George II, and prime favourites with him. He was Lady Emily’s godfather, and the christening cup he gave her is still preserved at Carton. He was delighted, beyond measure, when one day, taking his constitutional on the broad walk at Kensington, he saw a charming little maid rush from her French bonne and come bounding up to him with a saucy “Comment vous portez vous Monsieur le Roi, vous avez une grande et belle maison ici, n’est ce pas?” It was little Lady Sarah Lennox, and the king, having discovered her identity, invited her bonne to carry her often to see his “grande et belle maison.” The children learned to speak French before they spoke English, and Lady Emily, in particular, showed herself all through life an enthusiastic admirer of French literature, and very accessible to the new ideas of which that literature made itself the vehicle. Horace Walpole tells us of the delight he experienced, on one occasion when he had invited her and her sister, Lady Caroline, with their husbands, Lord Kildare and Mr. Fox, to Strawberry Hill, and the weather turned out too wet to show his company the wonders of his castle and grounds, to find that Lady Kildare was “a true Sévignist.” “You know,” he remarks to his correspondent, Richard Bentley, “what pleasure I have in any increase in our sect” (i.e. the cult of Madame de Sévigné). “I thought she looked handsomer than ever, as she talked of Notre Dame des Rochers.”[19] Later on, we hear from Mrs. Delany of her admiration for Rousseau, and his theories of education; and we know from one of her daughters that her great interest in education made her a diligent reader of Madame de Genlis. She seems to have spent much time in her girlhood with her mother’s relations in Holland, and this fact, together with the French influences which presided over her education, gave her a European point of view, which was in striking contrast with the insularity of the majority of English-women of her class and generation. Doubtless, this cosmopolitanism of his mother’s was, also, not without its effect on Lord Edward.
In 1744, her elder sister, Lady Caroline, eloped with Mr. Henry Fox, to the great displeasure of the Richmonds. “The town,” writes Horace Walpole to his namesake in Florence (May 27th, 1744) “has been in a great bustle about a private match; but which by the ingenuity of the ministry, has been made politics. Mr. Fox fell in love with Lady Caroline Lennox, asked her, was refused, and stole her. His father was a footman;[20] her great grandfather, a king: hinc illae lacrymae.”
It was only after some years, and when the birth of Lady Caroline’s eldest little boy made the struggle between tenderness and pride in her parents’ hearts incline overwhelmingly towards the former, that they consented to a reconciliation. The touching letter which the Duke addresses to his daughter on this occasion has been published by the Princess Liechtenstein in her book on “Holland House” (pp. 68-72), and will be read with interest by all who have learned to like Lord Edward’s maternal grandfather and grandmother, from Horace Walpole’s account of them.
One consequence of Lady Caroline’s runaway marriage was to make the Duke and Duchess of Richmond extra careful about the chaperonage of their second daughter, Lady Emily. Horace Walpole has an amusing story to tell in this connection of a little “set-to” between the Duchess of Richmond and the witty but eccentric Duchess of Queensberry. “There is a very good quarrel on foot between two duchesses: she of Queensberry sent to invite Lady Emily Lennox to a ball: her Grace of Richmond, who is wonderfully cautious since Lady Caroline’s elopement, sent word ‘she could not determine.’ The other sent again the same night: the same answer. The Queensberry then sent word, that she had made up her company, and desired to be excused from having Lady Emily’s; but at the bottom of the card wrote, ‘Too great a trust.’”[21]
Carefully guarded as Lady Emily might be, the town was soon busy with her name. When Prince Lobkowitz arrived in England in the beginning of 1745 and was observed to pay great attention to the Duke of Richmond’s charming daughter, it was immediately reported that they would make a match of it. The gossip even reached Mrs. Dewes, deep in the provinces, and in reply to a question she puts her sister, Mrs. Delany, about it, the latter gives the accepted version of the story:[22] “You were not quite misinformed about Lady Emily Lennox and Prince Lobkowitz; he was in love with her and made proposals of marriage, but the Emperor would not consent on some foolish reason of State. I never heard that Lady Emily was in any way engaged to him, and everything is agreed on between her and Lord Kildare, and my Lady Kildare is come over for the wedding. Prince Lob. was in England last year.”
Well informed as Mrs. Delany prided herself on being, it is not to be expected that she would know as much about the matter as Lady Emily herself; and fortunately we have in a letter of the latter’s addressed to her friend, Hon. Anne Hamilton,[23] her version of the incident. As the letter gives a vivid idea of our heroine as a lively girl, of fourteen or fifteen, and of the sort of society in which she moved, it is worth reproducing.
“Prince Lobkowitz, who I believe you remember a giddy, good-natured wild young man, as any in the world, was coming to Goodwood, and has had a fall off his horse, so that I fancy he won’t be here this good while; a propos to him I must make you laugh and tell you what the Town says, he is in love with me, I very much so with him, but his relatives don’t care he should marry a Protestant, though as he is his own master that would be no objection, but that Papa and Mamma, great as he is, won’t part with me, and besides have other views for me; is not this a pretty story. I assure you ’tis told for certain all over the Town, and several of my friends have told me of it. The truth of the matter is, he is vastly fashionable, and as I happen to speak French and to know most of his acquaintances in Holland, he takes it into his head to talk a good deal to me, and you know in London two people can never talk together a quarter of an hour but they must immediately either be in love or to be married. They say also that the Venetian ambassadrice is in love with him and with rather more truth, for she really behaves very ridiculously about him.[24] As you love these sort of things I must tell you a ridiculous thing enough. Prince Lobkowitz was one night at supper at the Venetian ambassadrice’s and the Prince of Wales sent for him, upon which he went and she was excessively angry with him for leaving her to go; in joking she said since he would go she would keep his hat. Accordingly the next morning she cut the hat into a million of little pieces and sent it to him with her compliments. About a week after he told her a pye which he had promised her had come from Germany, upon which she invited a vast deal of company to dinner, and when she came to open the pye, behold it was the bits of hat which she had sent him. I think it gives one a very good notion of them both.”
Very soon after, “the Town” had given her a new suitor—and this time with more reason. As early as April 15th, 1746, Mr. Horace Walpole was able to report to Sir Horace Mann that the Duke of Richmond “has refused his beautiful Lady Emily to Lord Kildare, the richest and first peer of Ireland, on a ridiculous notion of the King’s evil being in the family.” The Earl persisted in his suit, and the Duke’s objections were finally overcome so that by the end of the year we find Lady Emily writing to her friend “Nancy” Hamilton to announce her betrothal. “In short, in order that the whole town of London should not tell a lye, Lord Kildare desires to make them speak truth, and as Papa and Mamma have no objection to it. I am willing to save them from this and heartily wish they would tell no more.” A little after the announcement of the engagement, Mrs. Delany met the beautiful bride-elect at the Prince of Wales’s “Birthday” in Leicester House, and waxes enthusiastic in a letter to her sister, Mrs. Dewes (January 21, 1747), over her loveliness. Even the hideous dress of the moment (“hoops of enormous size and most people wear vast winkers to their heads”), which make other women look like “blown bladders,” could not destroy Lady Emily’s exquisite beauty. “The reigning beauty I think among the young things is Miss Carpenter, Lord Carpenter’s daughter, and since Lady Dysart was fifteen I have never seen anything so handsome; but the prize of beauty is disputed with her by Lady Emily Lennox. She is indeed ‘like some tall stately tower’; the other is ‘some Virgin Queen’s delicious bower!’”
The marriage took place on February 7th, 1747, when the bride was a little over sixteen. Horace Walpole has the record of the event in the chronicle he sends his friend in Florence on February 23rd, 1747. “Lord Kildare is married to the charming Lady Emily Lennox, who went the very next day to see her sister, Lady Caroline Fox, to the great mortification of the haughty Duchess-mother. They have not given her a shilling, but the King endows her by making Lord Kildare a Viscount-Sterling[25] and they talk of giving him a pinchbeck dukedom, too, to keep him always first peer of Ireland.”
It was quite true that Lady Kildare (who, in common with the rest of the family, had been forbidden all intercourse with Lady Caroline since the latter had married Mr. Fox in opposition to their parents’ wishes) made immediate use of the liberty conferred by her new position to visit her sister. Lord Kildare and she urged a reconciliation, with more zeal perhaps than discretion. In the letter of the Duke to Lady Caroline to which I have already referred, he complains very bitterly of the tone adopted by the Kildares, “who instead of makeing entreatys, were pleas’d to tell your mother that wee ought to forgive you, and were blamed by the world, and by themselves for not doing it, which is a language I would hear from nobody, and indeed when they saw how it was received, they did not think fit to repeat it. And I assure you my reconcilement to you has been defer’d upon this account, for I will have both them and yourselves know that it proceeds from the tenderness arising in our own breasts for you, and not from their misjudg’d aplication.”
The first few months after the marriage were spent by Lord and Lady Kildare in England and the young wife’s letters to her girl friend are full of bridal happiness. But her “dearest Nanny” is not to think that when she says she is happy, “it is from being her own mistress, doing just what she please, and all the fuss and racket.” “No, believe me, that my happiness, thank God, is upon a better foundation. It is from being marry’d to the person I love best in the world, and who is the best and kindest of husbands.”
James, twentieth Earl of Kildare, was just twenty-five at the time of his marriage, and had succeeded his father, Robert, nineteenth Earl, three years previously. His young Countess might well find him “the best and kindest of husbands,” for he was one of the best and kindest of men, much concerned for the welfare of his people and his country, and taking a serious view of the duties and responsibilities of his great position. He was the leader of the popular party in the Irish House of Lords, and when the corrupt administration under the Duke of Dorset and Primate Stone had become intolerable to the people he took the bold step of presenting a memorial against them to King George II. His brave fight with tyranny and corruption made him the idol of the populace, and on one occasion “he was an entire hour passing through the crowd from Parliament House to Kildare House, and a medal was struck to commemorate the memorial, representing the Earl, sword in hand, guarding a heap of money on a table from a hand which attempted to take it, with the motto, ‘Touch not, says Kildare.’”
By July, 1747, the young Earl and Countess were back in Ireland settled for the moment at Dollardstown. The Dowager Countess and Lady Margot, the Earl’s sister, came on a visit to them, and these with Miss Brudenell, the young Countess’s companion, and a couple of men friends of the Earl’s, make up a party very much to the bride’s taste. “We read, work, write and walk,” she informs her confidante Miss “Nanny.” They are presently to take up residence in Carton, which the Dowager Lady Kildare has given over to her son and his bride, having completed it after her husband’s death and furnished it for the young people from top to bottom—even to “the table linen.” It would be ungrateful of the new Countess—after this generosity on the part of her mother-in-law—to seem indifferent about Carton, but in truth she leaves the simplicity of Dollardstown for the grandeur of Carton with much regret.
A few weeks later we find our young people in residence at Carton, with the elder Lady Kildare and her daughter, Lady Margot, as their guests. The young wife, one gathers, stands a little in awe of her grave, reserved mother-in-law, whose manner “until ye are well acquainted with it, is not very taking.” But she is quite in love with Lady Margot, “whom she [i.e. the Dowager] is very strict with.” She is “really charming, and I find I shall grow vastly fond of her. She is vastly lively, very sensible and a very open heart, for she always speaks her mind, and has a very open heart.” In a later letter she makes merry over the compassion she received from those friends who thought it “a very dismal thing for her” to have to leave London—the new London house the Earl had bought for her in Whitehall—“to come with the person in the world I love best, who studies how to please me and make me happy more and more every day, to a very pretty country where I meet with nothing but civilities from everybody, to a whole family who are agreeable and cheerful and vastly fond of me, and to a country where I have a charming house building [Leinster House], a sweet place [Leinster Lodge] which you know I always delight in, and another pretty place [Carton]. Certainly I deserve great compassion for all this.”
While “her charming great house” was a-building, the Earl took a town house for his bride’s first winter in Dublin in Stephen’s Green, and she did the honours of her great position by giving some large parties in it. She enters with great zest into her Lord’s building and improvement schemes. Beautiful Leinster House, perhaps the most perfect creation of Richard Castle’s architectural genius, was nearing its completion, and although her health does not permit her to share her Lord’s weekly visit to Carton, she keeps au courant with all that is being done there. “Lord Kildare has cut down the avenue, which I am sure makes it charming, and has made a very fine lawn before the House, which I think is the greatest beauty a place can have.”
A few weeks after the date of this letter, her first child George, Lord Offaly, was born (January 15th, 1748) and the young mother’s cup of happiness seemed full to overflowing. She was one of those women who have the genius and the passion of maternity, and much of her sweetness was due to this characteristic. During the following years her letters to her friend are full of the pretty children who have followed George into her nursery at quick intervals. William, her second son, afterwards Duke of Leinster, was born in March, 1749, and the Countess’s first little girl arrived in August of the following year. Her friend receives an entertaining account of the small bundle of femininity: “in the first place her name is Caroline Elizabeth Mabel. Caroline after my sister, Elizabeth after the old Lady Kildare in London, and Mabel to please Mr. Fox, who had entertained himself while he was here in reading over old manuscripts and letters belonging to the Kildare family, in which he found there had been a great many Mabels, and therefore begged we would tack it on to the other two, which was done accordingly. And now ye have the history of her name. I will tell you she is in the first place fat and plump, has very fine dark long eyes which I think a great beauty, don’t you? and her nose and mouth like my mother’s, with a peaked chin like me. As for her complexion she is so full of red gum that there is no judging of it, but what is best of all is that she is in perfect health and has been so ever since she was born. But it’s not fair to her brothers to entertain you only about her without mentioning them.” And so we get a charming picture of the two little boys, and incidentally a glimpse of their pretty young nineteen year-old mother in the midst of them: “To begin with George. He is in the first place much improved as to his beauty, but the most entertaining, comical arch little rogue that ever was, chatters incessantly, is immensely fond of me, and coaxes me not a little, for he is cunning enough, very sweet tempered and easily governed by gentle means, in short if I was to sit down and wish for a child it would be just such a sort of boy as he is now. William is a sweet child, too, in a different way, he is not so lively or active as George is by a good deal, but is forward enough both as to his walking and talking, for he says several words and walks quite alone. As for his little person it is fat, round and white as he was when you saw him, and does not improve as to that; he is the best-natured creature that can be, and excessively passionate already, but puts up his mouth to kiss and be friends the very next moment. He is vastly fond of his nurse and does not care twopence for me, so you may imagine I cannot for my life be as fond of him (though in reality I love him as well) as of George, who is always coaxing and kissing me, and does not care for anybody else.”
The poor young mother was to have the great grief of seeing two of these pretty children die young. Lord Offaly died in 1765 at the age of seventeen, and was succeeded as heir, by William. Little Caroline died in 1754 at the age of four. The fatality which, as has been already observed, pursued the large eighteenth-century families, did not spare our beautiful Countess’s. Of the nineteen children (nine sons and ten daughters) she bore her lord during the twenty-six years of their married life there only survived the years of childhood six sons: William, Charles, Henry, Edward, Robert, Gerald; and four daughters: Emily (afterwards Countess of Bellamont), Charlotte (afterwards Baroness Rayleigh), Sophia, and Lucy.
In the meantime, knowing nothing of what the future has in store for her, the Countess is a very happy woman. The improvements at Carton, in which she is so interested, have been a great success, and no wonder she longs to go there and see how “her spotted cows” look on the new lawn from which the Earl has cleared some hedges since she was there last. Did she ever tell her friend of her passion for spotted cows? She believes not: “You have no notion what a delightful beautiful collection of them I have got in a very short time, which indeed is owing to my dear Lord Kildare, who ever since I took this fancy into my head has bought me every pretty cow he saw. It’s really charming to see them grazing on the lawn.”
So, with her children, the part she took in her husband’s plans for the improvement of his estate, and his tenantry, her social duties, her frequent visits to England, the years of the Countess’s married life passed swiftly and happily. Mrs. Delany meets her occasionally in Dublin society, but one gets the impression that Lady Kildare keeps the Dean of Down’s lady at some little distance, and that may account for the rather bitter tone in which the latter speaks of the Countess. The Dowager Countess was a great friend of Mrs. Delany’s, by whom she was frequently visited in London, and whom she visited at Delville. But it is significant enough that the mistress of Delville, having invited to breakfast Mrs. Vesey and Lady Kildare, “Lord Kildare would not let his lady venture so far.” On another occasion Mrs. Delany went with Mrs. Vesey and their friend Letitia Basle to visit Carton, and call on Lady Kildare and Lady Caroline Fox. But they found nobody but the Dowager “at home,” and were not even invited to dinner. These experiences are probably at the bottom of Mrs. Delany’s evident acrimony against the Countess. Writing to her sister, Mrs. Dewes about Rousseau, who, during a sojourn of his in England, was the guest of their brother, Bernard Grenville, Mrs. Delany warns her of the danger he may be “to young and unstable minds ... as under the guise of pomp and virtue he does advance very erroneous and unorthodox sentiments. It is not the bon ton who say this, but I am too near the day of trial to disturb my mind with fashionable whims. Lady Kildare said she would ‘offer Rousseau an elegant retreat, if he would educate her children.’ I own I differ widely with her ladyship, and would rather commit that charge to a downright honest person. I mean as far as religious principles; but perhaps that was a part that did not enter into her schemes at all.” When the Duchess, as she then was, startled her friends by her second marriage to Mr. Ogilvie, Mrs. Delany’s observations on the event were in the worst possible taste. After a little tilt at her as “one of the proudest and most expensive women in the world,” this typical Mrs. John Bull, with all the unctuous priggishness and fondness for innuendo of her class, quotes a horrid jest of Lady Brown’s, and proceeds to bestow her quite uncalled-for pity on the Duchess’s “poor children.” It is easy to suppose that our charming and clever Lady Kildare found herself bored to death with Mrs. Delany, and her hideous shell-work, and the other atrocities on which she lavished her time (with the profound conviction that she was setting an example for all womanhood), and that she committed the unforgivable offence of avoiding her as much as she could.
At the Coronation of King George III, in September, 1761, our Countess, then the mother of ten children, walked in the procession of the peeresses and, according to Horace Walpole’s account of the proceedings to Hon. H. S. Conway, was with her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Richmond, and Lady Pembroke, “the chief beauties.” To the Countess of Ailesbury he compares this trio to “the Graces.” To George Montagu he speaks of “Lady Kildare, still beauty itself, if not a little too large.” It is clear that her Ladyship’s beauty was not the transient thing which passed with the passing of youth. She was forty-eight when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the portrait of her, which is still in Kilkee Castle. “What a beautiful head!” cried Edmund Burke in a rapture of admiration, when he saw the portrait in his friend’s studio. “Sir Joshua with much feeling replied: ‘It does not please me yet; there is a sweetness of expression in the original which I have not been able to give to the portrait, and therefore cannot think it finished.’”
In 1766 the Earl, who had been made to suffer as much as the administration dared for the bold stand he had taken in Irish politics, received at last the “pinchbeck dukedom” which had been promised him nearly twenty years ago. Government was as kind to him now, as it had been averse to him before; and lucrative offices were offered him in quick succession. But death took him from the midst of his splendour, and one November day in the year 1773 he was carried from the beautiful home he had built for himself in Leinster House to the family vault in Christ Church, where his ashes await the resurrection.
The Duchess, after a short widowhood, married, to the consternation of most of her friends, and the scandal of the Mrs. Delanys, her sons’ Scotch tutor, Mr. Ogilvie. The marriage, contrary to expectation, turned out extremely well. Under a rather dry and unattractive exterior Mr. Ogilvie had a kind heart, and was most devoted to his step-children, who, on their side (and this is true of Lord Edward in a special degree), were very fond of him. Lady Sarah Bunbury,[26] writing from her brother-in-law, Mr. Connolly’s place at Castletown, to her friend, Lady Susan O’Brien, shortly after the marriage took place, hints that the Duchess had been forced to the step she had taken, by “the impertinence” of her daughter, Lady Emily, who had recently married the dissipated Earl of Bellamont, to her mother’s intense displeasure. It further appears, she told her son (William, Duke of Leinster), her mother-in-law, and her sister (Lady Louise Connolly) that she thought it very possible she should marry Mr. Ogilvie. They all agreed in the same thing for answer, that they could not wish it, but if she was happy it was all they wished; and that she could not choose a person she had a better opinion of and had more regard for. With such a sanction, you would perhaps think there was nothing for her to do, but to inform her brother (the Duke of Richmond) of her marriage tout simplement, but I wish you had seen the affectionate, the reasonable manner in which she wrote to my brother, and indeed to all her friends. One of her expressions to him is, ‘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.’ My brother says there is no resisting her owning herself in the wrong, and begging so hard to be loved, so you see the good effect of meekness; I assure you my sister gains friends instead of losing any by her manner.
After her second marriage the Duchess and her husband, Mr. Ogilvie, taking the younger children with them, went to live in France, where her grace’s brother, the Duke of Richmond, had put his house at Aubigny at their service. Here the two little Ogilvie girls were born, Cecilia and Emily, and were made heartily welcome to the family circle by their kind-hearted half-brothers and sisters, the Fitzgeralds. In the meantime these boys and girls were going on with their studies under Mr. Ogilvie’s direction, and the successful careers of Lord Charles and Lord Gerald in the navy, Lord Edward in the army, Lord Henry in politics, and Lord Robert in diplomacy were largely due to the skill and prudence with which Mr. Ogilvie directed their preparatory studies.
In 1780 the family returned to Ireland, and the Duchess saw her brood of boys scatter for their first flight. For the next six or seven years she, with her girls, divided her time between Ireland and England. But from 1785 to 1787 she was settled in Dublin with Lord Edward, back for a portion of the time, under her wing, and her girls going out a good deal under the chaperonage of the young Duchess of Leinster, and their aunt, Lady Louisa Connolly. In the summer of 1787 we learn from Lady Sarah Napier that the Duchess was in Barège for the sake of Lady Lucy’s health, and she was looking forward to the pleasure of being joined by three of her sons, when news of Lord Gerald’s death at sea reached her. From 1788 the Duchess took up her permanent abode in London, probably with the idea of getting her daughters suitably settled. As regards Lady Charlotte these expectations were fulfilled the following year when she married Mr. Strutt.
In 1788 and 1789 Lord Edward was in Canada and his letters to his mother describing his adventures, “deep in Canadian woods” and on the banks of Canadian lakes and rivers, were looked forward to with great eagerness by the Duchess, and passed from hand to hand among the family circle, even finding their way from London to Castletown, for Lady Louisa Connolly’s and Lady Sarah Napier’s delectation. “He writes,” the latter informs her friend, “the most natural and pretty account of his journey you ever read, comments on the spirit of the chase, the melancholy end of it, the inferior passions of hunger driving away pity, his low spirits when he thinks of all his friends, and ends: ‘My dear mother, I fear we are all beasts and love ourselves best.’” Lord Edward was a special favourite of his aunt, Lady Sarah, and nothing that befel “this dear spirited boy” left her cold. One of the most delightful spectacles in the world was to see how he brought his love-troubles to her and to “his dearest mother” with the full certainty of their sympathy and help, and understanding.
He had been for some time deeply in love with his cousin, Georgina, daughter of Lord George Lennox, but the young lady’s father would not consent to the match and married the girl to Henry Bathurst, Lord Apsley. By an unfortunate chance Lord Edward, arriving in England, unexpectedly from Canada, drove up to his mother’s house in Harley Street at the very moment she was giving a dinner-party in honour of the bridal pair.
Disappointed in love, Lord Edward threw himself eagerly into politics, and devoted his time to his duties in the Irish Parliament. On the outbreak of the French Revolution he hurried to Paris, and in the enthusiasm with which he adopted revolutionary principles, he took the extreme step of “renouncing” his title, and in consequence of this he was dismissed from the English army.
In December, 1792, Lord Edward married Pamela, who was generally believed to be the daughter of the Duke of Orleans and Madame de Genlis. The marriage cannot have been much to the liking of the Duchess. But, like the wise woman she was, she offered no opposition to her son’s choice, once she saw his heart was set on it, and when he came to her a few weeks later to present his bride to her, she opened wide her heart and arms to “the dear, little, pale, pretty wife.”
During the five years that followed, Lord Edward and Pamela kept in the closest possible touch with the Duchess through a constant correspondence and frequent visits. But it was only one portion of his existence which her son revealed to his loving mother. There is no hint of politics, of the stern business which was to be wound up in the bloody liquidation of “’Ninety-Eight,” in the letters which “Eddy” writes in the open bay window of the little book-room in Frescati, with the birds pouring out their song and the perfumed garden its fragrance all around him. It is of her flowers and shrubs he tells the Duchess, “I believe there never was a person who understood planting and making a place as you do. The more one sees of Carton and this place [Frescati] the more one admires them; the mixture of plants and the succession of them are so well arranged.” He gladdens her heart with a description of Frescati and the shrubs she had planted, in all their June loveliness. “All the shrubs are out, lilac, laburnum, syringa, spring roses, and lily of the valley”—in short the whole is heavenly. He seeks her approval for his own gardening plans and labours: he has had the little green full mowed and rolled, the little mound of earth that is round the bays and myrtle before the house planted with tufts of gentianellas and primroses, and lily of the valley, and they look beautiful, peeping out of the dark evergreen; close to the root of the great elm he has put a patch of lily of the valley. A fine February morning finds him “digging round roots of trees, raking ground and planting laurels,” and planning to have hyacinths, jonquils, pinks, cloves, narcissi in little beds before the house and in the rosery. If his mother will trust him to prune the trees, in the long round, he thinks he can do it prudently.
Later on he tries very hard to make his mother see the home he has made for his wife in Kildare—the little white house with bay windows, all covered with climbing roses and honeysuckle—the “dear wife” herself in her little American jacket planting sweet peas and mignonette—her work-box with the little one’s caps on the table in the open window.
The expected “little one,” “the little young plant that was coming,” filling its young father with proud joy, arrived in October, 1794, in the shape of another little Eddy, and the Duchess was very glad to accede to her big Eddy’s request, and to be its godmother. The little Eddy was subsequently left with his grandmother for good, after his parents’ visit to Hamburg in 1796, which was to have such momentous political consequences. Little did the poor Duchess know for what his father was preparing when “the precious Babe” was left with her! She is full of gratitude for the gift, and full of appreciation of the sacrifice the “dear Edwards” have made in parting with it—they “who adore it and delight in its pretty ways.” We get charming glimpses of the Duchess and the pretty boy in some letters to Lady Lucy. Now he is at play among the sheep on the green hill beneath her window; now at her elbow while she is writing, and full of messages for her to give to Papa and Mamma. “Eddy, dood boy, Eddy, happy boy. Papa ride horseback, Mama dance.” which shows, the Duchess remarks, “that he remembers them.” Again, the Duchess is showing him a lock of Papa’s hair which Lady Lucy has sent her mother, and Eddy is kissing it a thousand times: “Papa’s hair, Eddy’s own Papa’s hair!” She loves to gather up his comical remarks. “I told him something he was eating was enough and that more was too much. ‘But Eddy don’t like enough, Eddy like too much.’”
In October, 1797, Lord Edward saw his mother for the last time. After that, events moved with tragical swiftness to the catastrophe of May 19th, 1798.
It was ten days after Lord Edward had got his fatal wound in the altercation with Major Ryan that his mother was told of his condition. As soon as the news was broken to her, she declared that she must go to her boy at once. They kept her in London, persuading her that it was there she might serve his cause, seeing great people, using all the influence she could command to have his trial put off. Only poor Lucy, more closely in sympathy with Lord Edward than any of the others, feels how useless all this is. “All that human foresight could point out they are doing, but alas! Edward is dying and alone!”
It was only on June 6—when Lord Edward had been two days dead—that the Duchess, Mr. Ogilvie, Lady Sophia, Lady Lucy, and “Mimi” Ogilvie set out at length for Ireland. They were met on the road by the messenger bearing the fatal news.
Lord Edward’s daughter, Pamela, shall tell us the end of the story: “The Fourth of June, when the guns fired for the King’s birthday, was always a dark day in the house; poor Grandmamma appeared in deeper mourning, and somehow there was a sort of stillness; we spoke with bated breath, and went softly ... it was the anniversary of my father’s death. Grandmamma wore his coloured handkerchief next her heart, and it was put into the coffin with her.”