There were never such devoted sisters
Jane Gardam
ARISTOCRATS by Stella Tillyard Chatto & Windus, f20, pp. 462 R eading this book is like being caught under a sparkling waterfall on a hot and dusty day. It is the quadruple biography of Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 18th-century daughters of the second Duke of Richmond, illegitimate grandson of Charles II and his 'young wanton' and French mistress Louise de Keroualle. For over 400 pages we are showered, bombard- ed with facts about these women. There is no conjecture, no stepping aside to consid- er, no mention of earlier views that may differ. The tale rushes on with the fluency and authority of a writer enchanted by her subject, and although the appendix of sources and the bibliography show how huge an archive she has to deal with thousands of letters covering almost a cen- tury, hundreds of papers, account books, political reports, household ledgers of estates that were almost kingdoms and most of it 'untapped' material — she never flags and nor do we.
Stella Tillyard has the gift of making every fact riveting and every scene in Lon- don, France and Ireland come alive. Seri- ous, frightened, romantic Caroline, aged 13, kisses goodbye her five-year-old sister halfway down a Whitehall we recognise, outside their commanding home, Rich- mond House, and runs away to Conduit Street to marry plebeian Henry Fox, the parvenu set for great office, 25 years old. We go with her all the way. Years later, here is Henry Fox being wheeled round what is now Holland Park, his great old- fashioned Elizabethan house looming behind him. He is obese, disillusioned, waiting to die. About the same time, Louisa Lennox is looking out of a window of the great house, Castletown, watching a small army of Irish peasants carrying pikes cross her lawns in the moonlight. Far away in Sussex, Sarah Lennox sits ominously demure while the world around her tears its hair at her flagrant immorality. In Ire- land, Emily, the magnificent sister, Duchess of Leinster, writes brave coded letters in Carton House, with its hundred fireplaces and walls running with damp and its outrageously expensive silk upholstery, and waits for news of her dying son, Edward Fitzgerald, the Irish patriot. It sounds like a huge 19th-century novel and there is the skill of a superb novel in the handling of four such lives simultaneously: the drama of great historical events mingled with the detail of everyday life health, shopping, scandal, housekeeping, births, breast-feeding, menstruation, menopause, death.
Stella Tillyard's luck is in the survival of the letters. Sisters, when they do get on, can be closer than anyone else, closer than parents who are apt to leave the stage halfway through the play, closer than hus- bands or lovers who never knew Act One. Friends change and brothers many. Sisters tend to stick around. The Lennox sisters were wide apart in age, Emily 20 years older than Sarah, but they had had the same sort of unusually loving childhood (which they in turn gave their own children), and when their mother died Emily took over the two young ones who called her 'Ma' when they were not calling her `Sis'. They thus all knew each other's weaknesses and tendencies to fabricate and boast. All is not over for sisters when they tell each other to shut up or when they flounce off in fury or even — as with the Lennoxes — when they split into different political parties, mock each other's hus- bands and children or scandalise society with extra-marital activities. And sisters can sometimes confess to idiocies in love they might not pass on to a friend and certainly not to a parent.
Four sisters who get on as well as these, however, must be rare. There are two sad years when politics divide them, but other- wise the protestations of love and respect for each other are constant and sound like more than conventions of the day. Emily, Caroline and Sarah seem to have had a perfect passion for Louisa who sounds a paragon, except for one sudden squall when she demands public penance for sin- ful Sarah who has left her dreadful hus- band Mr Bunbury for a lover and then left the lover and has nowhere to go. One has a suspicion that Louisa might not have been so stately if she had had children or had not been damped down by a husband as unexciting and ugly as Mr Tom Conolly of Castletown.
But 'What lives they lived,' says Stella Tillyard. Caroline, who ran off to many Henry Fox, became a political influence and mother of the brilliant Charles James Fox who could converse in Greek at seven. She was widely read — all four sisters read, wrote and spoke French equally as well as English — and a devoted, faithful wife. Her misfortune was her anguish of love for her family. She almost killed her eldest son with doctors who prescribed quantities of mercury and crushed woodlice and caused him to twitch convulsively for the rest of his life. She and Fox shared advanced views on education. Holland House ran with children to the amazement of visiting mem- ben of parliament and ministers. Once Henry sat his son Charles astride a side of beef on the table and allowed him to bathe in a huge bowl of cream on the floor. Caro- line's own childhood had been fraught before Emily was born and she had appalling mental and physical health. Details of her menstrual troubles make one's heart go out to her, as does her long brave fight against what must have been cancer of the womb and a devastating menopause that must have strained the marriage and not helped her husband's career. Had there been hysterectomy, one wonders — though Stella Tillyard never hints at anything so fanciful — might we have not lost the American colonies?
No such trouble with Emily Lennox who lived to be 78 and had 22 children, rearing all but five of them. Sometimes she moans about her eternal pregnancies but then laughs and says she really doesn't mind. (Her husband, the Earl, says that once when a child came up to him as he sat at his desk he didn't have the faintest idea which one it was). Emily lived in ramshack- le splendour in the Kildare house. Like the other sisters she was formidably well- educated, but, unlike the younger two she was a radical, supporting the American War of Independence and deeply involved with the fortunes of Ireland. The greatest interest in her life was education, and the greatest influence was Rousseau. She even tried to get him to come to Ireland to teach her great brood, but he turned her down and she had to make do with a Mr Ogilvie from Scotland, whose deep interest in the education of her children equalled her own. She fell in love with Ogilvie and had a child by him (no. 19) and when the great duke died she married him and had three more, the last when she was 47. This scan- dalised the world and they had to go for a few years to live in one of the chateaux of her wanton great-grandmother in France. Emily remained beautiful and adored to the end of her life.
The saintly Louisa was a quieter, almost languid woman who loved everyone, even her husband (who was regarded by her sis- ters secretly as a disaster and whom even she called 'the flea'). He was the richest man in Ireland, the heir of a dodgy solicitor and owner of the great house that she loved and restored. She funded a school for Catholic and Protestant children and con- cerned herself with the poverty of Ireland. The peasants did not harm her in the revo- lution and at her death 2,000 of them fol- lowed her coffin.
Sarah, the most alluring of the sisters, almost had the most spectacular career of them all. She was not beautiful. She stooped and peered and wore odd clothes and behaved with apparently intense uncertainty, but she had some sort of sexu- al power that drove men wild and at 15 the Prince of Wales fell madly in love with her and her brother-in-law, pleb Fox, now a Minister of State, told her to prepare her- self to be Queen. But it never happened. George III married a foreigner and Sarah, it is perfectly clear, was knocked off the ratchet for a very long time and did not recover. She married the terrible Mr Sun- bury who did not like women and spent his time with the horses. After she had left him and the subsequent lover and tried a life in the shadows, she was divorced and married the 'most perfect made man', George Napi- er, whose wife accommodatingly died for them. Sarah flummoxed everyone, particu- larly Louisa, who believed you must be good to be happy, by settling down on army pay in a house near Castletown and pro- ducing three generals, one the national hero, General Napier of Sind. She educat- ed and brought them up magnificently and was a marvellous wife and mother.
The old age of the four sisters is touch- ingly described with not a hint of mournful twilight, though, goodness knows, it is sad. Caroline died in great pain; Emily, in the fullness of years, died not broken but shad- owed by the death of Fitzgerald. Louisa died splendidly, but after finding out that her husband had had a mistress for years whom she had been expected to make pro- vision for. Sarah died in London mumbling and senile.
Mr Ogilvy survived them all at Black Rock in Dublin Bay, the school where he had so happily taught most of the next gen- eration of the sisters' families. As a widow- er, he interested himself soberly in the movements of oceans, dying at 92, five years before Victoria came to the throne. `When,' says the author, ending as briskly and vividly as she has managed the whole of this delicious book, 'he crossed over to another shore from which no human ingenuity can find return.'
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