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.
Footnote 19:
A name given by Horace Walpole to Madame de Sévigné, of whose
“Letters” he was a devoted enthusiast. He sometimes calls her “_Notre
Dame de Livry_”—_Les Rochers_ and _Livry_ were the names of her
country seats.
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_.”
Footnote 20:
Sir Stephen Fox was said originally to have been a choir-boy in
Salisbury Cathedral. He died, after a romantic career, and having held
office under four sovereigns—Charles II, James II, King William, and
Queen Anne—one of the wealthiest men in England.
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]
Footnote 21:
Letter to Sir Horace Mann, March 29, 1745.
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.”
Footnote 22:
Letter to Mrs. Dewes, November 7, 1746.
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.
Footnote 23:
Afterwards Countess of Roden. The letters of Lady Emily to Miss
Hamilton are in the possession of the Earl of Roden and have been
published by the Marquis of Kildare in his “Earls of Kildare,” Second
Addenda, 1866, p. 76 _et seq._
“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.”
Footnote 24:
Some of the pranks of this lady, which created a sensation, even in
the irresponsible society of the period, are related with great
_verve_ by Horace Walpole.
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.”
Footnote 25:
That is an _English_ viscount, in contrast to the “pinchbeck” of an
Irish title.
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.