Читать книгу Wellington: A Personal History - Christopher Hibbert - Страница 19
Оглавление‘She has grown ugly by Jove!’
HE HAD first set eyes on the Hon. Catherine Dorothea Sarah Pakenham, daughter of the second Baron Longford, years before in Ireland where her father, a post-captain in the Royal Navy, had, for a few months before he had come into the family title, been Member for County Longford. Arthur Wesley had often called at the Longfords’ house in Rutland Square in Dublin and had made his feelings for Kitty known. She was a small, slim, vivacious and generous girl, indiscreet in her gossipy talk, much given to condemning the failings of others and to making dogmatic statements on matters which her knowledge of them did not justify. She read a great deal, sermons and books on religious matters as well as popular novels. An occasionally haughty manner concealed an inner uncertainty; but she was a well-liked young figure in Dublin society.1
Her parents had not at that time taken kindly to Arthur Wesley’s interest in their daughter. A younger son in a large family, his prospects had not then seemed bright and his reputation, like his eldest brother’s, was far from unblemished. This was the attitude also of Kitty’s brother, Thomas, who became the third Baron Longford upon their father’s death at the age of forty-nine in 1792.
So all thoughts of marriage had to be abandoned; but Arthur Wesley assured Kitty that, should those prospects become more certain, and her brother become more, kindly disposed towards him, his own mind would ‘remain the same’, a promise that he afterwards felt to be binding upon an honourable man. The years passed. He seemed almost to have forgotten her; certainly he never once wrote to her from India; none of the shoes he bought were destined for her feet, nor jewels for her throat, nor shawls for her shoulders. But she evidently had been thinking of him as she later admitted one day to Queen Charlotte at court. ‘I am happy to see you at my court, so bright an example of constancy,’ the Queen said to her, according to Kitty’s own account given to her friend, Maria Edgeworth. ‘If anybody in this world deserves to be happy, you do. But did you really never write one letter to Sir Arthur Wellesley during his long absence?’
‘No, never, madam.’
‘And did you never think of him?’
“Yes, madam, very often.’2
Yet there had been a time, when, hearing nothing from him, so Kitty told her best friend, the Hon. Olivia Sparrow, the wife of a rich, elderly soldier, General Bernard Sparrow, she had begun to suppose ‘the business over’. Another officer, Galbraith Lowry Cole, second son of the Earl of Enniskillen and three years younger than Arthur Wellesley, had fallen in love with her and had asked her to marry him. She had hesitantly accepted him. But then she was given to understand by her friend, Mrs Sparrow, who was in correspondence with him in India, that Arthur Wellesley was still attached to her. He had written to Mrs Sparrow to say that notwithstanding his good fortune and ‘the perpetual activity’ of his life in India the disappointment he had met with eight years before, and ‘the object of it and the circumstances’ were still as fresh in his mind ‘as if they happened only yesterday’. When you see your friend,’ he had added, ‘do me the favour to remember me to her in the kindest manner.’3
When told of this letter, Kitty replied, ‘Olivia, you know my heart … and can imagine what gratitude I feel, (indeed much more than can be expressed) for his kind remembrance … You know I can send no message; a kind word from me he might think binding to him and make him think himself obliged to renew a pursuit, which he might not then wish or my family (or at least some of them) approve … Do you not think he seems to think the business over?’4
Although still unsure about Arthur Wellesley, after much worry and consideration and to the annoyance of his family, she had broken off her engagement to Lowry Cole, greatly to his sorrow. ‘I had expected that before this Lowry would have married,’ one of his brothers wrote to another member of their family in October 1802. At present I see not the smallest chance of it … Since that love affair with Kitty Pakenham, Lowry seems like a burnt child to fear the fire and not to have any wish to hazard his happiness by paying attention to anyone else.’*5
The distressing contretemps had undermined Kitty’s health; she had grown thin and worn and had lost much of the prettiness and most of the bouncy sprightliness of her younger days. In October 1803 she had gone to Cheltenham to try to recoup her strength. Lowry Cole was there at the same time and his brother wrote, ‘Kitty is in Cheltenham. I am beginning to think she wishes to bring on the subject again with Lowry, but he fights shy. She will deserve it, as she treated him cruelly.’6
Only too well aware that she had much changed, Kitty was extremely nervous when she heard that, in a letter to Olivia Sparrow dated August 1804, Arthur Wellesley had declared that his ‘opinion and sentiments respecting the person in question’ were the same as they had ever been; and she was even more apprehensive when she learned that he had arrived in London and had authorized Olivia ‘to renew the proposition he had made some years ago’.
Kitty did not know what to say in reply. She would be ‘most truly wretched’, she replied to Mrs Sparrow, if she had cause to believe that Sir Arthur was repeating his offer in fulfilment of an undertaking he had made so long ago. The letter from him which she had been shown did not contain ‘one word expressive of a wish that the proposition should be accepted’. There was no indication that ‘Yes would gratify or that No would disappoint’. Besides, she added, ‘I am very much changed and you know it within these last three years, so much that I doubt whether it would now be in my power to contribute [to] the comfort or happiness of any body who has not been in the habit of loving me for years like my Brother or you or my Mother.’7
Someone else warned Sir Arthur that he would find Kitty Pakenham, now aged thirty-four, ‘much altered’; but he maintained that ‘he did not care. It was her mind he cared for’, he said, ‘and that would not alter’.8 So, having obtained permission from her brother to do so, he wrote to her formally proposing marriage. She was reluctant still. She told him that she did not think it fair to engage him before he had seen her, until he was ‘quite positively certain that [she was] indeed the very woman [he] would chuse for a companion a friend for life’. ‘In so many years I may be much more changed than I am myself conscious of,’ she concluded. ‘If when we have met you can tell me … that you do not repent having written the letter I am now answering I shall be most happy.’9
Undeterred but quite without evident enthusiasm, Sir Arthur departed for Ireland in April 1806 at the age of thirty-seven to marry a woman with whom he was not in the least in love. He had been in no hurry to leave England where he had been busy with private as well as public affairs, paying visits to Cheltenham, where he stayed at the Plough, to Stowe to see the Marquess of Buckingham and Cirencester to call upon Lord Bathurst. Taking temporary lodgings at 18 Conduit Street, he had gone out to buy music at Robert Birchall’s shop in New Bond Street – romantic songs, light operas, Mozart – and dinner and breakfast services at Flight and Barr’s china shop in Coventry Street.10
He was described by Kitty’s friend, Maria Edgeworth, who saw him now for the first time, as being ‘quite bald’; but this was only because his unpowdered hair was cut so very short. Extremely plain herself, Miss Edgeworth also wrote of him as being ‘handsome, very brown … and a hooked nose’.11
Sir Arthur could find nothing remotely handsome about his anxious bride who, in Miss Edgeworth’s words, ‘coughs sadly and looks but ill’. Mrs Calvert thought that he ‘must have found her sadly altered, for she was a very pretty little girl, with a round face and fine complexion. She is now very thin and withered … She looks in a consumption.’12 A few years before, the Prince of Wales, on meeting his bride for the first time, had murmured to Lord Malmesbury who had brought her over to England from Brunswick, ‘Harris, pray bring me a glass of brandy’, before retiring to a far corner of the room. Similarly disappointed, Sir Arthur was said to have whispered to his brother, now the husband of the eldest daughter of Earl Cadogan, the Rev. Gerald Wellesley, who was to conduct the marriage service in the drawing room of the Longfords’ house in Rutland Square, ‘She has grown ugly by Jove.’13
Having already overstayed his leave, Sir Arthur remained in Dublin for less than a week before sailing back to London after the briefest of honeymoons from which he was seen returning on the box of the carriage while his bride remained inside. She followed him to England later in the care of his brother, Gerald; and, having stayed with Mrs Sparrow for a time, while her husband still occupied his bachelor rooms, she set up house with him at n Harley Street, a smart residential street first rated in 1753 and not yet favoured by doctors.14 Here she settled down uneasily to begin her married life, her husband’s solicitors having drawn up a settlement by which he would contribute £20,000 and she £4,000 with a further £2,000 from her mother. Sir Arthur’s hopes that she would prove as exact in money matters as he was himself were not to be realized.15
