Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832 by Stella Tillyard

Author:Stella Tillyard [Tillyard, Stella]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781446498125
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

‘Are you not delighted with our dear little Sally’s thinking herself with child?’

Caroline to Emily, 14 June 1768.

‘I am very glad you have bought that place at the Black Rock,’ wrote Emily’s seventeen-year-old son and heir, the Marquis of Kildare, in 1766. William was much too old to benefit from the Black Rock regime. By 1766 he had left Eton, a plump and hesitant young man whose lack of aptitudes and ambition were unfavourably compared with the shining talents of his cousin Charles Fox. While he remained the second son, Emily and the Duke regarded William’s rotund simplicity as endearing. But when Ophaly died in 1765, William became his father’s heir and something had to be done with him. His parents debated their son’s future. In the summer of 1766 Emily consulted Caroline who recommended a foreign military academy. But the Duke despaired, writing from London where he had gone to consult William about his plans: ‘Indeed my Emily, I am always glad to hear your opinion upon every subject and particularly about the children, who you know are equally in our care. Of all the difficulties I was ever under, what to do with William is the greatest I ever had, or I hope shall ever have, and yet there is no harm in him … In regard to geography, mathematics and what is called belles letters, how is it possible to do more than advise him at his age?… It is to be hoped, as parts break out at different ages, his will some time or other.’

Eventually it was agreed that William would go to a military academy in France and from there would set out on the Grand Tour, a journey which would, the Duke hoped, give him a patina of learning and manners. For the first few months of the Grand Tour William would have company because the Fox family had decided to travel en masse to Italy in the autumn of 1766.

After the success of her trips to Paris in 1764 and 1765, Caroline was prepared to venture further afield. She had many motives for her journey and its destination. Ste Fox, recently married to Mary Fitzpatrick, a tiny, intelligent girl much to Caroline’s liking, wanted to resume his continental peregrinations. Charles Fox was attracted by the literary and amatory reputation of Italy, and Henry Fox was prepared to spend a winter in the Mediterranean for his health. Caroline wanted desperately to keep her husband interested enough in life to pull himself out of his trough of boredom and morbidity and Italy excited her because she would, she hoped, see her Roman history books come to life there. ‘I love the notion of seeing all the places one has read of in Roman history, where great men have been and great things done,’ she explained to Emily.

Paris had prompted Caroline to new areas of reading and study. After 1764 she supplemented her reading of novels and histories with travel writings and maps, spending hours with big maps spread out on her desk in a window seat in her apartment.

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