In October, 1791, the Countess escorted Mademoiselle to England, accompanied by Pamela, Henriette de Sercey, and her little grand-daughter, Eglantine de Lawoestine. During this visit the Countess made the acquaintance of Sheridan, who had recently lost his beautiful wife. The resemblance of Pamela to his lost love (which is said to have later attracted Lord Edward) gained the heart of Sheridan, and he begged for her hand. His offer, it is said was accepted, and when the Duke of Orleans recalled his daughter to France, in order to avoid the penalties designed for “émigrés,” Pamela left England as the affianced bride of the distinguished dramatist.
But there was waiting in Paris another lover than Sheridan—and it was he, though they had never seen each other up to this, with whom Pamela’s lot was to be bound up.
One night at the theatre in Paris Lord Edward Fitzgerald saw in a loge grillée an exquisite looking girl. He made inquiries, and having learned her identity, had himself presented to Madame de Genlis and her beautiful charge. The following day Madame de Genlis and Pamela, acting on the instructions of the Duke of Orleans, set out for Flanders, with Mademoiselle d’Orléans. They were followed by that ardent and impetuous wooer, Lord Edward Fitzgerald.
At Tournay Lord Edward made formal proposals for Pamela’s hand, and his suit was accepted, on the condition of him receiving his family’s consent to the marriage.
This consent the Duchess of Leinster, wise mother that she was, gave very readily, and within a fortnight, Lord Edward was back in London with his bride.
The “good family” gave the warmest of welcomes to its new member. The diary of Lady Sophia Fitzgerald records the impression made on them by “Eddy’s dear little wife.” “We all took a prodigious fancy to her, and I do hope and trust Dearest Edward has met with a woman that will fix him at last, and likely to make him happy the remainder of his life. Besides being very handsome she is uncommonly sensible and agreeable, very pretty, with the most engaging pleasing manner I ever saw, and very much accomplished. They spent a fortnight with us in London before they went to Ireland where they are now.” Lady Sarah Napier, who was to be Pamela’s true friend to the end, fell in love with her at first sight. “I never saw,” she wrote to Lady Susan O’Brien, “such a sweet little, engaging, bewitching creature as Ly. Edward is, and childish to a degree with the greatest sense. The upper part of her face is like poor Mrs. Sheridan, the lower part like my beloved child Louise; of course I am disposed to dote upon her. I am sure she is not vile Egalité’s child; it is impossible.”
That letter of Lady Sarah’s is dated from Celbridge, February, 1793, and showed that by that time Pamela and her husband had arrived in Ireland. Into the gay social round of the Irish capital, the beautiful French girl entered con brio. “Dublin has been very gay,” Lord Edward writes to his mother in April, 1793, “a great number of balls, of which the lady misses none. Dancing is a great passion with her; I wish you could see her dance, you would delight in it, she dances so with all her heart and soul. Everybody seems to like her, and behave civilly and kindly to her. There was a kind of something about visiting with Lady Leitrim, but it is all over now. We dined there on Sunday, and she was quite pleasant, and Pamela likes her very much.”
Unfortunately for Pamela’s happiness, her husband was wrong in thinking everybody seemed to like her. The ladies of the Ascendancy party hated her with all their hearts, and behaved with inconceivable rudeness to her. Her husband, ever since his return from Paris (whence the stories of his “revolutionary” doings had preceded him), had been a marked man for the “Old Gang,” and his bride’s supposed relationship to Egalité (who had recently been guilty of the infamy of voting for Louis XVI’s death) was not calculated to re-establish him with them. The vilest stories were set in circulation about poor Pamela. One lady is supposed to have seen her in the streets of Dublin “with a handkerchief on her neck spotted with Louis XVI’s blood; that some of her friends had sent from Paris.” When everybody else was in mourning for Louis, she is said to have worn red ribbons “which she said were couleur du sang des Aristocrats.”
On one occasion the whim took her to go to a ball, dressed all in black with nothing to relieve the sombre effect, except the pink upon her head. The Doblin Lidies, according to her sister-in-law, Lady Lucy, “stared her out of countenance” and sent her home in a rage to Eddy.
Her sisters-in-law, and specially Lady Sophia, were quick to see that it was jealousy of Pamela’s beauty and charm, her exquisite dancing, her French toilettes, her husband’s undisguised admiration—far more than their hatred of her and Lord Edward’s politics which made Dublin society so hostile to her. Other sections of Irish society worshipped her. We have a pretty picture of Lord Edward and her driving in a very high phaeton one day through College Green and Dame Street, amid the enthusiastic cheers of the multitude, who were raised to congenial heights of enthusiasm as much by her beauty as Lord Edward’s conspicuous green neck-cloth. Lord Edward’s boyish delight at the reception accorded them, and the impression produced by his bride’s beauty, was very delightful to witness.