Part 5
So, with her children, the part she took in her husband’s plans for the improvement of his estate, and his tenantry, her social duties, her frequent visits to England, the years of the Countess’s married life passed swiftly and happily. Mrs. Delany meets her occasionally in Dublin society, but one gets the impression that Lady Kildare keeps the Dean of Down’s lady at some little distance, and that may account for the rather bitter tone in which the latter speaks of the Countess. The Dowager Countess was a great friend of Mrs. Delany’s, by whom she was frequently visited in London, and whom she visited at Delville. But it is significant enough that the mistress of Delville, having invited to breakfast Mrs. Vesey and Lady Kildare, “Lord Kildare would not let his lady venture so far.” On another occasion Mrs. Delany went with Mrs. Vesey and their friend Letitia Basle to visit Carton, and call on Lady Kildare and Lady Caroline Fox. But they found nobody but the Dowager “at home,” and were not even invited to dinner. These experiences are probably at the bottom of Mrs. Delany’s evident acrimony against the Countess. Writing to her sister, Mrs. Dewes about Rousseau, who, during a sojourn of his in England, was the guest of their brother, Bernard Grenville, Mrs. Delany warns her of the danger he may be “to young and unstable minds ... as under the guise of pomp and virtue he does advance very erroneous and unorthodox sentiments. It is not the _bon ton_ who say this, but I am too near _the day of trial_ to disturb my mind with fashionable whims. Lady Kildare said she would ‘offer Rousseau an elegant retreat, if he would educate her children.’ I own I differ widely with her ladyship, and would rather commit that charge to a downright honest person. I mean as far as religious principles; but perhaps that was a part that did not enter into her schemes at all.” When the Duchess, as she then was, startled her friends by her second marriage to Mr. Ogilvie, Mrs. Delany’s observations on the event were in the worst possible taste. After a little tilt at her as “one of the proudest and most expensive women in the world,” this typical Mrs. John Bull, with all the unctuous priggishness and fondness for innuendo of her class, quotes a horrid jest of Lady Brown’s, and proceeds to bestow her quite uncalled-for pity on the Duchess’s “poor children.” It is easy to suppose that our charming and clever Lady Kildare found herself bored to death with Mrs. Delany, and her hideous shell-work, and the other atrocities on which she lavished her time (with the profound conviction that she was setting an example for all womanhood), and that she committed the unforgivable offence of avoiding her as much as she could.
At the Coronation of King George III, in September, 1761, our Countess, then the mother of ten children, walked in the procession of the peeresses and, according to Horace Walpole’s account of the proceedings to Hon. H. S. Conway, was with her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Richmond, and Lady Pembroke, “the chief beauties.” To the Countess of Ailesbury he compares this trio to “the Graces.” To George Montagu he speaks of “Lady Kildare, still beauty itself, if not a little too large.” It is clear that her Ladyship’s beauty was not the transient thing which passed with the passing of youth. She was forty-eight when Sir Joshua Reynolds painted the portrait of her, which is still in Kilkee Castle. “What a beautiful head!” cried Edmund Burke in a rapture of admiration, when he saw the portrait in his friend’s studio. “Sir Joshua with much feeling replied: ‘It does not please me yet; there is a sweetness of expression in the original which I have not been able to give to the portrait, and therefore cannot think it finished.’”
In 1766 the Earl, who had been made to suffer as much as the administration dared for the bold stand he had taken in Irish politics, received at last the “_pinchbeck dukedom_” which had been promised him nearly twenty years ago. Government was as kind to him now, as it had been averse to him before; and lucrative offices were offered him in quick succession. But death took him from the midst of his splendour, and one November day in the year 1773 he was carried from the beautiful home he had built for himself in Leinster House to the family vault in Christ Church, where his ashes await the resurrection.
The Duchess, after a short widowhood, married, to the consternation of most of her friends, and the scandal of the Mrs. Delanys, her sons’ Scotch tutor, Mr. Ogilvie. The marriage, contrary to expectation, turned out extremely well. Under a rather dry and unattractive exterior Mr. Ogilvie had a kind heart, and was most devoted to his step-children, who, on their side (and this is true of Lord Edward in a special degree), were very fond of him. Lady Sarah Bunbury,[26] writing from her brother-in-law, Mr. Connolly’s place at Castletown, to her friend, Lady Susan O’Brien, shortly after the marriage took place, hints that the Duchess had been forced to the step she had taken, by “the impertinence” of her daughter, Lady Emily, who had recently married the dissipated Earl of Bellamont, to her mother’s intense displeasure. It further appears, she told her son (William, Duke of Leinster), her mother-in-law, and her sister (Lady Louise Connolly) that she thought it very possible she should marry Mr. Ogilvie. They all agreed in the same thing for answer, that they could not _wish it_, but if she was happy it was all they wished; and that she could not choose a person she had a better opinion of and had more regard for. With such a sanction, you would perhaps think there was nothing for her to do, but to inform her brother (the Duke of Richmond) of her marriage _tout simplement_, but I wish you had seen the affectionate, the reasonable manner in which she wrote to my brother, and indeed to all her friends. One of her expressions to him is, ‘I am content that you should call me a fool, and an _old fool_, that you should blame me, and say you did not think me capable of such a folly; talk me over, say what you please, but remember that all I ask of you is your affection and tenderness.’ My brother says there is no resisting her owning herself in the wrong, and begging so hard to be loved, so you see the good effect of meekness; I assure you my sister _gains_ friends instead of losing any by her manner.
Footnote 26:
Letter of July 29th, 1775, “Letters,” I., pp. 240-241.
After her second marriage the Duchess and her husband, Mr. Ogilvie, taking the younger children with them, went to live in France, where her grace’s brother, the Duke of Richmond, had put his house at Aubigny at their service. Here the two little Ogilvie girls were born, Cecilia and Emily, and were made heartily welcome to the family circle by their kind-hearted half-brothers and sisters, the Fitzgeralds. In the meantime these boys and girls were going on with their studies under Mr. Ogilvie’s direction, and the successful careers of Lord Charles and Lord Gerald in the navy, Lord Edward in the army, Lord Henry in politics, and Lord Robert in diplomacy were largely due to the skill and prudence with which Mr. Ogilvie directed their preparatory studies.
In 1780 the family returned to Ireland, and the Duchess saw her brood of boys scatter for their first flight. For the next six or seven years she, with her girls, divided her time between Ireland and England. But from 1785 to 1787 she was settled in Dublin with Lord Edward, back for a portion of the time, under her wing, and her girls going out a good deal under the chaperonage of the young Duchess of Leinster, and their aunt, Lady Louisa Connolly. In the summer of 1787 we learn from Lady Sarah Napier that the Duchess was in Barège for the sake of Lady Lucy’s health, and she was looking forward to the pleasure of being joined by three of her sons, when news of Lord Gerald’s death at sea reached her. From 1788 the Duchess took up her permanent abode in London, probably with the idea of getting her daughters suitably settled. As regards Lady Charlotte these expectations were fulfilled the following year when she married Mr. Strutt.
In 1788 and 1789 Lord Edward was in Canada and his letters to his mother describing his adventures, “deep in Canadian woods” and on the banks of Canadian lakes and rivers, were looked forward to with great eagerness by the Duchess, and passed from hand to hand among the family circle, even finding their way from London to Castletown, for Lady Louisa Connolly’s and Lady Sarah Napier’s delectation. “He writes,” the latter informs her friend, “the most natural and pretty account of his journey you ever read, comments on the spirit of the chase, the melancholy end of it, the inferior passions of hunger driving away pity, his low spirits when he thinks of all his friends, and ends: ‘My dear mother, I fear we are all beasts and love ourselves best.’” Lord Edward was a special favourite of his aunt, Lady Sarah, and nothing that befel “this dear spirited boy” left her cold. One of the most delightful spectacles in the world was to see how he brought his love-troubles to her and to “his dearest mother” with the full certainty of their sympathy and help, and understanding.
He had been for some time deeply in love with his cousin, Georgina, daughter of Lord George Lennox, but the young lady’s father would not consent to the match and married the girl to Henry Bathurst, Lord Apsley. By an unfortunate chance Lord Edward, arriving in England, unexpectedly from Canada, drove up to his mother’s house in Harley Street at the very moment she was giving a dinner-party in honour of the bridal pair.
Disappointed in love, Lord Edward threw himself eagerly into politics, and devoted his time to his duties in the Irish Parliament. On the outbreak of the French Revolution he hurried to Paris, and in the enthusiasm with which he adopted revolutionary principles, he took the extreme step of “renouncing” his title, and in consequence of this he was dismissed from the English army.
In December, 1792, Lord Edward married Pamela, who was generally believed to be the daughter of the Duke of Orleans and Madame de Genlis. The marriage cannot have been much to the liking of the Duchess. But, like the wise woman she was, she offered no opposition to her son’s choice, once she saw his heart was set on it, and when he came to her a few weeks later to present his bride to her, she opened wide her heart and arms to “the dear, little, pale, pretty wife.”
* * * * *
During the five years that followed, Lord Edward and Pamela kept in the closest possible touch with the Duchess through a constant correspondence and frequent visits. But it was only one portion of his existence which her son revealed to his loving mother. There is no hint of politics, of the stern business which was to be wound up in the bloody liquidation of “’Ninety-Eight,” in the letters which “Eddy” writes in the open bay window of the little book-room in Frescati, with the birds pouring out their song and the perfumed garden its fragrance all around him. It is of her flowers and shrubs he tells the Duchess, “I believe there never was a person who understood planting and making a place as you do. The more one sees of Carton and this place [Frescati] the more one admires them; the mixture of plants and the succession of them are so well arranged.” He gladdens her heart with a description of Frescati and the shrubs she had planted, in all their June loveliness. “All the shrubs are out, lilac, laburnum, syringa, spring roses, and lily of the valley”—in short the whole is heavenly. He seeks her approval for his own gardening plans and labours: he has had the little green full mowed and rolled, the little mound of earth that is round the bays and myrtle before the house planted with tufts of gentianellas and primroses, and lily of the valley, and they look beautiful, peeping out of the dark evergreen; close to the root of the great elm he has put a patch of lily of the valley. A fine February morning finds him “digging round roots of trees, raking ground and planting laurels,” and planning to have hyacinths, jonquils, pinks, cloves, narcissi in little beds before the house and in the rosery. If his mother will trust him to prune the trees, in the long round, he thinks he can do it prudently.
Later on he tries very hard to make his mother see the home he has made for his wife in Kildare—the little white house with bay windows, all covered with climbing roses and honeysuckle—the “dear wife” herself in her little American jacket planting sweet peas and mignonette—her work-box with the little one’s caps on the table in the open window.
The expected “little one,” “the little young plant that was coming,” filling its young father with proud joy, arrived in October, 1794, in the shape of another little Eddy, and the Duchess was very glad to accede to her big Eddy’s request, and to be its godmother. The little Eddy was subsequently left with his grandmother for good, after his parents’ visit to Hamburg in 1796, which was to have such momentous political consequences. Little did the poor Duchess know for what his father was preparing when “the precious Babe” was left with her! She is full of gratitude for the gift, and full of appreciation of the sacrifice the “dear Edwards” have made in parting with it—they “who adore it and delight in its pretty ways.” We get charming glimpses of the Duchess and the pretty boy in some letters to Lady Lucy. Now he is at play among the sheep on the green hill beneath her window; now at her elbow while she is writing, and full of messages for her to give to Papa and Mamma. “Eddy, dood boy, Eddy, happy boy. Papa ride horseback, Mama dance.” which shows, the Duchess remarks, “that he remembers them.” Again, the Duchess is showing him a lock of Papa’s hair which Lady Lucy has sent her mother, and Eddy is kissing it a thousand times: “Papa’s hair, Eddy’s own Papa’s hair!” She loves to gather up his comical remarks. “I told him something he was eating was _enough_ and that more was _too much_. ‘But Eddy don’t like _enough_, Eddy like _too much_.’”
In October, 1797, Lord Edward saw his mother for the last time. After that, events moved with tragical swiftness to the catastrophe of May 19th, 1798.
It was ten days after Lord Edward had got his fatal wound in the altercation with Major Ryan that his mother was told of his condition. As soon as the news was broken to her, she declared that she must go to her boy at once. They kept her in London, persuading her that it was there she might serve his cause, seeing great people, using all the influence she could command to have his trial put off. Only poor Lucy, more closely in sympathy with Lord Edward than any of the others, feels how useless all this is. “All that human foresight could point out they are doing, but alas! Edward is dying and alone!”
It was only on June 6—when Lord Edward had been two days dead—that the Duchess, Mr. Ogilvie, Lady Sophia, Lady Lucy, and “Mimi” Ogilvie set out at length for Ireland. They were met on the road by the messenger bearing the fatal news.
* * * * *
Lord Edward’s daughter, Pamela, shall tell us the end of the story: “The Fourth of June, when the guns fired for the King’s birthday, was always a dark day in the house; poor Grandmamma appeared in deeper mourning, and somehow there was a sort of stillness; we spoke with bated breath, and went softly ... it was the anniversary of my father’s death. Grandmamma wore his coloured handkerchief next her heart, and it was put into the coffin with her.”
The Mother of the Sheareses
JANE ANNE SHEARES, _née_ BETTESWORTH (-1803)[27]
“Come to me, O Christ, Take swiftly my soul Alike with my sons.” —_Lament of Mothers of Bethlehem._
Footnote 27:
_Authorities_: Madden’s “United Irishmen,” Fourth Series, Second Edition.
ON Saturday, May 19th, 1798, Lord Edward, desperately wounded in the gallant fight he had put up—one man against the multitude of his assailants—was taken prisoner and lodged in Newgate. Wounded and alone he lay in his gloomy cell, and on his hard prison bed through the long hours of the hot May Sunday that followed, and none of those who loved him was near at hand to bring healing to his fevered body, or comfort to his tortured heart.
On that same May Sabbath, when, from every open space that the retreating country had left behind her, in her flight before the city’s advance, there came the smell of the lilac and hawthorn, the honeyed fragrance of lime trees and chestnut blossoms—“all the sweetness of the May”—a different scene was taking place in another part of the city. In a handsome house at the corner of Baggot Street and Pembroke Street, a dinner-party was in progress. The _cuisine_ was irreproachable, the wine excellent, the conversation of a high order. The master of the house, a tall finely-built man of about forty-five, with something of the soldier in his bearing, sat at one end of the table. His countenance, usually somewhat stern and forbidding, owing to the haughty glance of his dark eyes, and the curious blood-red birth-mark which stained the lower part of his face, was softened now into geniality as his eyes swept the little circle of relatives and guests gathered around his hospitable board. His brother, a man of about thirty-two, of a singularly open and pleasing countenance, blue-eyed, clear-complexioned, with well-formed features and a clever mobile mouth, that showed, as the frequent smile parted it, a row of perfect teeth—sat opposite. An old lady—their mother—very stately and handsome in her rich dark dress and priceless lace, sat near her eldest son. Beside her was that son’s beautiful wife. On the opposite side of the table was the host’s sister, and beside her his daughter by an earlier marriage. By the side of the younger brother sat a tall man in the uniform of a Captain in the King’s County Militia.
Presently, dinner being ended, the ladies left the men of the party to their wine, and retired to the drawing-room. A knock at the front door, followed by the _frou-frou_ of silks and the murmur of feminine voices in the hall, announced the advent of after-dinner visitors. At the proposal of the younger brother of the host, the political discussion which the three men had inaugurated over their port was postponed, and a dish of tea with the ladies in the drawing-room was suggested. The dark eyes of the master of the house were full of merriment, while he explained to the guest what the magnet was that drew John from his politics. As the voices floated past them in the hall there had been clearly discernible the silvery tones of their beautiful neighbour, Miss Maria Steele. “You should hear some of the poetry he addresses to his Stella, Captain Armstrong!” said the host in laughing tones.
Captain Armstrong! Captain Warneford Armstrong! We know now, with that name ringing in our ears, that darker than the tragedy of Lord Edward, lying wounded to death in his prison cell at Newgate, is the tragedy that is being enacted before our eyes in this pleasant hospitable house. In this handsome dining-room, around the gleaming mahogany with its genial burden of fruit and wine, there sit—the informer, Captain John Warneford Armstrong, and his victims, Henry and John Sheares! And presently, if we have the courage to face it, and will follow the three men in their passage to the ladies in the drawing-room, we shall see an even more harrowing spectacle. For in that charming eighteenth-century room, all full of May sweetness from the tall open windows, all full of lovely ladies and beautiful children in their picturesque eighteenth-century costume, we shall presently see the traitor gather the two little children of Henry Sheares upon his knee, while their mother tunes her harp, and sings in her glorious voice, some exquisite, moving strain for his delectation.[28] It is the picture which the genius of Curran has made immortal: “I am disposed to believe, shocking as it is,” he cried, while he turned to the Jury, in the dim light of the ghastly midnight court where the Sheareses stood, two months later, on trial for their lives, “that this witness had the heart, when he was surrounded by the little progeny of my client—when he was sitting in the mansion in which he was hospitably entertained—when he saw the old mother, supported by the piety of her son, and the children basking in the parental fondness of the father—that he saw the scene, and smiled at it—contemplated the havoc he was to make, consigning them to the storms of a miserable world, without having an anchorage in the kindness of a father. Can such horror exist, and not waken the rooted vengeance of an eternal God?”
Footnote 28:
The incident of Mrs. Henry Sheares singing to her harp for the entertainment of Armstrong was related to Madden by Miss Maria Steele, the friend of John Sheares. In Curran’s “Life,” written by his son, it is stated on the authority of a gentleman who had dined with the Sheareses, on the day in question that “he observed Armstrong, who was one of the guests, taking his entertainer’s little children upon his knee, and as it was then thought, affectionately caressing them.” Armstrong denied to Madden the truth of these statements, but his denials were not considered convincing.
* * * * *
The poor old lady, on whom the diabolical treachery of the guest of that Sunday dinner-party was to bring such suffering that the whole annals of “’Ninety-Eight” have nothing to surpass it, had already tasted in a fuller measure, than is the lot of common women, the joys and the sorrows of life. The near kinswoman of the distinguished lawyer, Sergeant Bettesworth, and a relation of the Earl of Shannon, she had been married, while still very young, to a wealthy Cork banker, Mr. Henry Sheares, son of Henry Sheares, Esq., M.P., of Goldenbush. At Goldenbush, by the pleasant Bandon river, the young couple resided for some time, and here a number of their children were born. But at a later date the family lived at Glasheen, about a mile and a half from Cork, and their abundant means allowed them to keep up another establishment in the city—a house which has been identified by Dr. Madden as situated at the corner of Moore Street and Nile Street.
The young wife was highly accomplished, and it is rare to find a couple so perfectly matched, as were she and her husband, in every noble quality of heart and mind. She entered into his philanthropic schemes with the greatest zeal. Out of the abundance with which God had blessed them it was their joy to help all those in need. One of the spectacles which moved their compassion most keenly was that of decent poor people who, having fallen into debt, were by the barbarous law of the time, liable to be hauled off to prison for it, and to be herded with criminals, by whom they were too frequently contaminated. To help these unfortunates, whose only crime was poverty, Mr. Sheares instituted “the Society for the Relief of Persons Confined for Small Debts,” and in about nine months the secretary, Rev. Dr. Pigott, was able to report that “more than seventy poor wretches have been relieved by this institution from the depths of misery, and all the horrors of loathsome confinement—by which, at the same time, above 240 children (besides wives and other poor dependent relations) have had those restored to them from whose labour they derive their bread, and the community has been enriched by the replacing of many useful and industrious members.”