[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.”
[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.
[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.”
[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.”
[25]. That is an English viscount, in contrast to the “pinchbeck” of an Irish title.