Aristocrats (7 page)

During the month of January 1747, Ste got better, although his shuddering and twitching did not stop. Caroline filled her letters with his naughtiness and misdeeds and pronounced herself a satisfied mother. ‘I feel great comfort and satisfaction in sitting in the room next to dear Ste,’ she wrote to Henry
one evening a few days before they left Bath. ‘Indeed the greatest pleasure I shall have in life next to being with you is to take care of Ste and whatever other children I may have. For people of my stupid disposition who don’t love the great world have nothing better to do than take care of their children.’ While Caroline was convalescing, Henry had been busy politicking in London. Since their marriage he had risen fast. He was watched from a discreet distance with mingled dismay and amazement by his father-in-law who, through the medium of his friend the Duke of Newcastle, was well apprised of Henry’s manoeuvring.

Once he had become a friend of Lord Hervey’s and a Whig, Fox came under the aegis and tutelage of Hervey’s political boss Sir Robert Walpole. By 1735, Walpole, as First Lord of the Treasury and effective leader of the House of Commons, had been in power for nearly fifteen years. He controlled the House with a masterful and heady blend of bribery, preferment and personal charm. With the King in one pocket and the Commons in the other, Walpole was virtually unassailable when no more was demanded of his pragmatic policies than they could supply. He realised that, by not moving into the House of Lords, as the man who became First Lord of the Treasury customarily had, he could hang on to the Commons and the Cabinet at the same time and, if the King’s support was added to that, he could combine in himself all the most important bases of power.

Walpole had no party in the House of Commons, only a crowd of supporters who voted with the government, some from principle, others for profit, others, like the young Henry Fox, for political advancement. On the floor of the House and in the labyrinth of the Palace of Westminster, Walpole’s most trustworthy and sturdy lieutenant in the Commons was Henry Pelham, younger brother to the Duke of Newcastle, and it was to Pelham that Fox attached himself. He had chosen the right man. In 1742, three years into a trade war with Spain that had escalated into a full-scale European
conflict known as the War of Austrian Succession, Walpole was toppled. After a year of instability, Henry Pelham became First Lord of the Treasury and it was then that Fox got his Treasury post.

Pelham’s authority was much less secure than that of his mentor. Unlike Walpole he did not have the complete confidence of the monarch. After Walpole’s demise, George II relied on John, Lord Carteret, to conduct foreign policy, instead of Pelham’s brother, the Duke of Newcastle, who was nominally in charge as the Secretary of State. Newcastle and Pelham begrudged the huge sums of money needed to wage a Continental war. But Carteret, a polymathic diplomat and famous drinker, endorsed the Hanoverian aim of a peaceful Germany at all costs. George was desperate to secure the peace and autonomy of Hanover from the territorial ambitions of other states, and he gratefully employed Carteret in the byzantine negotiations between crowned heads that went on behind the movements of money and troops.

For four years, between 1742 and 1746, the political turmoil at home matched the turbulence of the European war. George II fought and beat the French at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743, but the general drift of the war was in favour of the French and their allies, the Prussians and the Spanish. In 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender (‘our cousin’ as the Lennox girls called him), took advantage of the confused and undefended state of the kingdom to land in Scotland. His advance south was ultimately destroyed not so much by the efficiency of the Duke of Cumberland as by apathy towards the Stuart cause. Gentlemen who for years had openly been toasting the King ‘over the water’ and marking the anniversary of the death of Charles I with theatrical mourning and demonstrations of grief, now feared for their property and their lives. Hasty conversions to the Hanoverian crown were seen all over the kingdom and the Young Pretender was forced to flee back into the land of sentiment and the imagination where he was immortalised as a romantic
and unhappy splash of tartan in a Hanoverian grey reality. The King continued to rely on Carteret’s advice and in 1744 Pelham and his brother threatened to resign in protest. Carteret was eventually dismissed, but with the war going badly and with the 1745 rebellion threatening national self-confidence if not the Hanoverian settlement itself, the King continued to consult him behind the scenes. Patience with the monarch finally wore out, and in February 1746 virtually the whole administration, including Henry Fox and the Duke of Richmond, whose Mastership of the Horse brought an honorary Cabinet post, resigned. George II was unable to form a government with the shreds of Carteret’s support and he was forced, after a few weeks, to ask Newcastle and Pelham back on their own terms. Carteret was thrown into oblivion as a condition of their return. For the next eight years Pelham and his brother presided over a relatively stable administration.

At the beginning of the new government there was a period of shuffles and reshuffles of the Cabinet. It was in one of them that Fox got his chance. He became Secretary at War. The job brought a Cabinet post and a good deal of trouble. Europe was still in turmoil and no peace was in sight. Fox had wanted the post of Paymaster General of the Forces, a lesser though more lucrative and easier job, reckoning that it offered a step up the political ladder without the political risks involved in taking the War Office. But that had gone to Fox’s rival Pitt, and ambition, of which Fox had a great deal, demanded that he accept the secretaryship. Refusal would signify faintheartedness and signal the premature end of his political career. But faint-hearted was exactly what Fox was, as he freely confessed to his brother, ‘I fear I must take it, to quarrel with the army and … to do business from morning to night.’

Before Fox was offered the post, Newcastle had thought it prudent to reassure the Duke of Richmond that he would not have to do any business with his hated son-in-law. A deputy could stand in for Richmond when he needed to work with the War Office. Richmond tried to stop the appointment but
Fox was by this time indispensable to the government and any duty of friendship that Newcastle owed to Richmond was rapidly cast aside by political expediency. Fox had become a more important political figure than his father-in- law and Richmond was made to realise it in no uncertain terms.

Having got the job, Henry and Caroline began looking around for a house to go with it. As a protégé of Walpole, Fox knew that splendid surroundings elevated a host and humbled his guests. Walpole had built Houghton, his country mansion, as a temple to power, a palace overflowing with the rewards of offices. Visitors there were stupefied by acres of plush damask and taffeta, sunk in the curves of French upholstery and overcome by the weight of gilded ceilings and golden picture-frames. Fox was looking out for a house on a smaller scale in which he could entertain and impress. What he and Caroline found, in the summer of 1746, was a house quite unlike the modern palaces successful politicians put up to demonstrate their exalted positions. It was a huge, decaying, unfashionable Jacobean mansion called Holland House, just on the western edge of London. Holland House came cheap, especially when its size was taken into account. It cost £102 16s. 9d. a year, not much more than the Foxes’ house in Conduit Street, but the price reflected its dilapidation and un-fashionableness. Henry and Caroline took Holland House on an extendable lease for ninety-nine years.

London was already marching relentlessly westwards when the Foxes leased Holland House. But the mansion still stood, a decaying anachronism, in a large park of sixty-four acres. When Henry and Caroline arrived, the park was unenclosed, bounded to the south and east by the gardens of Kensington Palace and its satellite cottages, to the north by the Acton road and to the west by open country dotted with artisans’ dwellings and small vegetable gardens, gravel pits and farms.

Holland House appealed to Caroline because she had a passion for antiquities and although it was only a century and a
half old the style of the house had been relegated to the scrap heap by most aristocrats and merchants who were building on any scale. It also reminded her of her father’s house at Goodwood, from which she was now banished, which had survived only because he had spent a huge amount of money on Richmond House in London and plans to rebuild in Sussex had so far come to naught. Because Caroline’s taste was for the old-fashioned and she was scornful of warmer, more modern, house plans, the Foxes renovated rather than rebuilt. When they first took it, Holland House was empty. Half a century earlier it had been split into apartments and rented out, but even these had proved unfashionable and the house had slipped into disrepair. It was built, like Goodwood, albeit on a much larger scale, in the H-plan common to many Jacobean mansions. The centre block rose, in gables and turrets, to four storeys; the two wings, running north to south, rose two imposing storeys high. A grand portico ran all the way around the inner walls of the house on the ground floor of the main, south-facing front, from which steps fell to an old-fashioned formal garden.

Holland House was so big that relatives and favoured friends could have their own apartments. Stephen Fox habitually stayed there on the increasingly rare occasions when he came up to London for parliamentary sessions. Charles Hanbury Williams, already renting his house in Conduit Street to the Foxes, was also given a room and took the precaution, made necessary by the tomb-like cold of the house, to pay for his own furnishings. Hanbury Williams had refused an embassy posting to northern Europe on the grounds that the weather there was too frigid and he was determined that Holland House would not prove a similarly inhospitable outpost. ‘I have ordered my upholsterer to get my room in order at Holland House, where I am sure of being pleased and happy,’ he wrote to Henry in 1746. His hosts, however, were notoriously careless of the cold, often leaving the doors open in the dead of winter. Less close friends were often scared into staying in town by tales of room temperatures that no hospitality,
however warm, could mitigate. ‘I can’t venture to go to stay at Holland House yet awhile,’ wrote Caroline’s sister Emily one autumn day in 1761 while she was recovering from childbirth. ‘I should be killed there, I know, for I could not (even for my first visit, which I thought a little unkind) get them to keep the doors and windows shut. I really found it very cold, but I saw it was thought affectation and fancy.’

Luckily, Holland House was near enough to Westminster to allow dinner guests to travel home at night, and big enough to accommodate both hardy souls and those too incapacitated to take to the road. Domestic and political life could thus go hand in hand. Fox could entertain in a manner normally only possible in the country and attend to government business the next day. Caroline could be with Ste and with Henry at the same time; in her own apartments she could read, write letters, entertain callers and play with her son. In the garden she could saunter about, supervise planting and muse amongst the flowers. Caroline frequently complained that their closeness to town brought all Fox’s political associates to their door: ‘Indeed when he is in business this place is quite like a coffee house.’ Jealously, she felt that Holland House was too well placed for Fox’s casual social life. ‘Holland House is so convenient for his intimate friends to be constantly with him, that they take up all the time I could see him alone, and plague me ten times more than people who have real business with him.’ But Caroline could and did retire from late-night carousing, and she realised that because Holland House allowed them to combine the spaciousness of the country with the business of the town she enjoyed a good deal more of Henry’s company than politics might otherwise have allowed her. Fox became such a famous family man partly because his cronies and political associates saw him amongst his children at Holland House. For his children, equally, politics and nursery life were mixed together and the child and adult worlds fused hard and fast.

PART THREE

‘The Lord Kildare is not the most clever man in the world’.

Caroline to Henry, 15 January 1747
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It was soon after signing the lease of Holland House in 1746 that Caroline went to Bath, and it was from Bath that she sent Henry the news that her fourteen-year-old sister Emily was going to be married. For Caroline that meant a reunion, since Emily would now be free to see her as she pleased. But their intimacy would be short lived and henceforth at least partly epistolary, because Emily was marrying an Irishman who, unlike many Irish aristocrats, was determined to live in Ireland. His name was James Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare. Once again, the Duke and Duchess were opposed to the match; this time on the grounds of nationality rather than social standing or political antecedents. Still bitter about her own treatment, Caroline reported to Henry, ‘I think mother can’t prevent the match, but I think she will delay it for a month or two if she can. I don’t think she was ever so thoroughly mortified before as she is at this match for she must seem pleased with it in the eyes of the world at the time she would give her ears to break it.’ As for the Earl himself, Caroline went on, he ‘is not the most clever man in the world (and consequently not company for such a great man as you). Don’t decline being intimate with him because I shall like seeing my sister a good deal and that pleasure will be much greater if I can be with you both at a time.’