Nor was it the populace alone whom Pamela won by her beauty. Lord Charlemont, whose authority in all matters of taste was regarded as second to none in Europe, was charmed by her. Jepham was with him one day in 1793 in Charlemont house, when Pamela and Lord Edward came to view its treasures, and he wrote to his uncle describing the visit. “She is elegant and engaging in the highest degree, and showed the most judicious taste in her remarks about the library and curiosities. The Dublin ladies wish to put her down. She promised Lord Charlemont with great good humour to assist him in keeping her husband in order.... She was dressed in a plain riding habit, and they came to the door in a curricle.”[[82]]
[82]. Moore tells us that Lord Edward first introduced this style of vehicle into Ireland.
The attitude of the women of her class whom she met in society, probably spoiled her party-going for her, and doubtless she was eager enough, before long, to share with her husband the quiet country life, which he loved so well. After a few months in the Duchess of Leinster’s charming seaside residence, Frescati, Blackrock (where Pamela had plenty of opportunity, in conjunction with the enthusiastic gardener, who was her husband, to put into practice the gardening lore she had acquired at Saint Leu) the young couple settled in a lodge belonging to Mr. Connolly (husband of Lady Louisa Connolly, Lord Edward’s aunt), in Kildare. Lord Edward has left in a letter to his mother, dated June 23rd, 1794, a charming description of the place, which was to be the setting for their lives during the short years that were destined for them to spend together. In that little cottage a good deal of Irish history was to be made in the short space of four years. Let us then look in it as Lord Edward has painted it for us—for, alas! no trace of it now remains.
“After going up a little lane, and in at a close gate, you come on a little white house, with a small gravel court before it. You see but three small windows, the court surrounded by large old elms; one side of the house covered with shrubs, on the other side a tolerable large ash; upon the stairs going up to the house, two wicker cages, in which there are at this moment two thrushes, singing à gorge déployée. In coming into the house you find a small passage-hall very clean, the floor tiled; upon your left a small room; on the right, the staircase. In front you come into the parlour, a good room, with a bay window looking into the garden, which is a small green plot, surrounded by good trees, and in it three of the finest thorns I ever saw, and all the trees so placed that you may shade yourself from the sun all hours of the day; the bay window covered with honeysuckle, and up to the window some roses.
“Going upstairs you find another bay-room, the honeysuckle almost up to it, and a little room the same size as that below; this, with a kitchen or servants’ hall below, is the whole house. There is, on the left, in the courtyard another building which makes a kitchen; it is covered by trees, so as to look pretty; at the back of it there is a yard, which looks into a lane. On the side of the house opposite the grass-plot, there is ground enough for a flower-garden, communicating with the front garden by a little walk.
“The whole place is situated in a kind of rampart, of a circular form surrounded by a wall; which wall, towards the village, and lane is high, but covered with trees and shrubs—the trees old and large, giving a great deal of shade. Towards the country the wall is not higher than your knee, and this covered with bushes; from these open parts you have a view of a pretty cultivated country, till your eye is stopped by the Curragh. From our place there is a back way to these fields, so as to go out and walk without having to do with the town.
“This, dearest mother, is the spot as well as I can give it to you, but it don’t describe well; one must see it and feel it; it is all the little peeps and ideas that go with it that make the beauty of it to me. My dear wife dotes on it, and becomes it. She is busy in her little American jacket, planting sweet peas and mignonette. Her table and workbox, with the little one’s caps, are on the table. I wish my dearest mother was here, and the scene to me would be complete.”
The “little one,” portion of whose layette, with Pamela’s exquisite stitching, was then lying on the table, was born in Leinster House in October, 1794, and was christened Edward Fox Fitzgerald. While his wife and little son are gaining strength to travel, Lord Edward has been down at Kildare, two or three times, making all things “snug” for the delightful winter he promises himself there. He has laid in a generous provision of turf—two fine big clumps which look both “comfortable and pretty.” He has paled in his little flower garden before the hall door with a lath paling like the cottage, and filled it with roses and sweet briar, honeysuckle and Spanish broom. He has got his flower-beds all ready for their destined occupants. “The little fellow,” the proud father thinks, “will be a great addition to the party.” “I think,” he goes on, giving us a glimpse of his ideal of a happy life (and making us realise how hard a sacrifice his own fate demanded of him), “that when I am down there with Pam. and the child, of a blustery evening, with a good turf fire and a pleasant book, coming in, after seeing my poultry put up, my garden settled—flower-beds and plants covered for fear of frost—the place looking comfortable, and taken care of, I shall be as happy as possible; and sure I am I shall regret nothing but not being nearer my dearest mother, and her not being of our party.”
In 1796 Lord Edward became a “United Man,” and from that period the little cottage in Kildare was seldom without guests. Chief among these was Lord Edward’s parliamentary colleague, Arthur O’Connor, but Lady Lucy Fitzgerald who spent a considerable time with her brother and sister-in-law after their return from Hamburg in October, 1796, mentions many others: Jackson, Oliver Bond, MacNevin, Father Connolly—and the sinister figure of Hughes, who, unknown to them all, was a government spy.
The visit to Hamburg to which we have alluded, took place in May, 1796, and its supposed object was to give Pamela an opportunity of visiting Madame de Genlis, who was then living in Hamburg, as a guest of M. Matthiessen, who had married her niece, and Pamela’s schoolmate, Henrietta de Sercey. Lord Edward and Arthur O’Connor went really as agents of the United Irishmen to negotiate with the French Government for a French expedition to assist the Irish in freeing themselves from the yoke of England. The Matthiessens’ house in Hamburg became a centre of Irish political activities, and we learn from Froude and Fitzpatrick that the long unsuspected spy, Samuel Turner, got much of the information, for which he was pensioned by the English Government, by his frequentation of that house.