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]]
[16]. “Letters,” II., 221.
[17]. “Letters,” I., 85. The editor of the Walpole “Letters,” identifies the second of these girls as Lady Emily, our heroine, but it seems very unlikely, as she was only ten years old at the date of this ball.
[18]. Ibid., p. 146.
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.
[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.”
[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]]