May, Lou & Cass Read online

  It may have been, in Fanny’s words, a horrible and odious infatuation, or as she described it in calmer mood at the end of the year, a ‘short-lived and absurd engagement’, but the whole family took it very seriously indeed.9 Yet, it is difficult to see why they were so much opposed to Mr Harris, who seems to have been a well-meaning, if slightly dull and rather delicate clergyman. He was also one of Charles’s shooting companions and had been on several occasions a dinner guest at Godmersham, so he was not socially unacceptable. It is possible that Fanny may have been prejudiced against Mr Harris by the fact that his eldest sister’s daughter had married the same James Wildman who was, in her youth, one of Fanny’s own unsatisfactory suitors, and was considered by Jane Austen not properly in love.10 Whatever Fanny’s argument, it did not move the gentle, patient and possibly headstrong Cassandra. It was only after her father brought her to Chawton, where her aunt Cassandra Austen may have added further weight to the case against Mr Harris, that she was persuaded against the engagement. Whether Cassandra Austen reminded her namesake, in the place so much associated with Jane, of her warning to Fanny in 1817 that she must not marry a man she did not love or, worse, suffer the torture of being married to one man while loving another, what is certain is that this visit to Chawton had a strange, and rather wonderful consequence.

  Shortly after Cassandra left Kent, Fanny received a visit on 19 August 1834: ‘Aunt Louisa and Louisa arrived to my extreme joy and astonishment to announce the astounding fact of Lord George Hill’s having actually been to Chawton, & dearest Cass being engaged to marry him! I was mad with delight all day.’ A ‘delicious long letter from Chawton’ then came from Lizzy ‘with the whole acc’t of Ld G’s arrival &c&c which I answered and enveloped to Louisa’ and at last, on 21 August, ‘a charming happy letter from Cass’.11 Lord George Hill, like young Lochinvar, had come out of the West. He had gone in person to Chawton, found that Cassandra’s love was still his after almost eight years, and all was settled. Even Lady Downshire ceased to object. ‘Lord George Hill is to be married immediately to a Miss Knight ...’ wrote one contemporary in Ireland, ‘an old courtship of eight years’ standing. Old Lady Downshire has been opposing it all along, but has at last consented.’12

  So it came about, finally, that on 21 October 1834, Edward Knight’s youngest daughter Cassandra Jane, in a white satin gown, with a grey satin pelisse about her shoulders, and a pink satin bonnet on her head, was married to Lord George Hill at St George’s, Hanover Square in London. It was the church famously favoured by the fashionable set, the bon ton of the Regency, such a choice representing in itself a statement by the Hills, and a departure for the Austens. Surviving accounts of the weddings of Lizzy, Fanny and their cousin Anna Austen lay emphasis on the family tradition of simple morning affairs at the local church, with a breakfast at home and, usually, the groom going shooting with a brother-in-law or two, and the bride, relaxed and happy, spending a last little while with her family.

  The celebration of this marriage could not have been more different. From the outset, Charles’s account makes it clear that Cassandra was a very nervous bride. In fact, nearly everything about the wedding spoke of anxiety for, though the resolution was a most happy one, everyone seemed on the day to be conscious of how very nearly it had not come about. The couple had had to wait as long as Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth and, in another curious reminder of Persuasion, Cassandra had nearly married someone else, so that an echo of the uneasy feeling at the very end of Persuasion, the sensation that the opportunity to reunite had almost been missed, seems to have pervaded the atmosphere of the day. Moreover, the account Charles gives of the wild autumnal days leading up to the wedding strengthens the impression of a family on tenterhooks, preceding by over a decade the romantic fervour of the Brontës. Indeed, Charles’s account anticipates something of Jane Eyre’s frenetic engagement to Mr Rochester.

  Preparations for the long and arduous journey to London began several days before when Lord George’s older brother Lord Arthur came to stay with the Knights. The next evening, 17 October 1834, at the end of a ‘cold blustery squally day ... Cassa’s maid came & said that the House of Lords and Commons were burnt down’.13 This strange and unsettling national disaster, which had happened just the night before, recurs in Charles’s account: the next day, he commented that ‘the papers were full of the fire’.14 It was a shocking event, symbolically burning away hundreds of years of England’s history and, with the winds and storms of autumn which continued all over the weekend, a less than happy omen for a wedding. ‘Blowing up for rain,’ Charles wrote on Sunday 19 October. ‘... I am afraid it will be a thorough wet day for our journey tomorrow.’15 Nonetheless, the large party – brothers, sisters, father, aunts, and several servants, though not Cakey, the Knights’ old nursemaid, Susanna Sackree, who was by now elderly and unwell – set out on what turned out to be ‘a cool fresh morning, looking rather as if it wd blow up for rain’.16 Their travelling arrangements alone provide a strangely apt snapshot of the relative positions of the family members:

  We sent off Mr Ross the painter in a chaise by himself to Ashford to meet the coach, & soon after, about 9 o’clock we all set off in 3 carriages and a gig. The gig went only to Charing, where the rest of the party disposed themselves in the 3 carriages & on we went. Lizzy, Fanny Rice and May in the chariot with Shilton Goodworth on the box; Lou and Cass in her new carriage with her two servants behind, Aunt Louisa, my father and I in the Barouche, with Joseph and Pilcher on the box.17

  The portrait painter, like the servants, was of secondary importance in the entourage: only Louisa, who would follow Cassandra in every way, joined her sister in the excitement of the new carriage, appropriate to the station of Lady George Hill. Their father and Louisa Bridges, their late mother’s sister, occupied the stylish but relatively solidly built barouche and Marianne, rather displaced, sat with her slightly older but long-married sister Lizzy and her young niece in the chariot, lighter, less substantial, and certainly lesser in consequence than the other conveyances.18 That evening, almost certainly as a result of motion sickness, Marianne withdrew. ‘All the travellers in our ride had bad headaches,’ Charles noted, ‘& Marianne was unable to attend the dinner, but otherwise they all bore it very well.’ Everyone else – twenty of them – sat down to a celebratory dinner in Albemarle Street. Cassandra’s father Edward, her sisters Fanny, Lizzy and Louisa were there, several of her late mother’s family, and Cassandra Austen, Jane’s sister. Four of the Knight brothers, Edward, Henry, Charles and John came, as did the groom, Lord George, and his brothers Lords Arthur and Marcus Hill. Later, they were joined not only by the redoubtable Lady Downshire, but also by Lord George’s aunt, Lady Salisbury, grandmother of a future Prime Minister, who would not have been outranked even by Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Indeed, Lord George’s position in society was not dissimilar to that of Mr Darcy, and his marrying for love a young woman of a good but unmoneyed family, almost equally remarkable. For the Knights, even without the new relationship to the extremely well-connected Lady Salisbury, this match had social cachet. ‘Altogether,’ Charles wrote, with Austenian understatement, ‘the day was very satisfactory.’19

  The next day, Tuesday 21 October, was the wedding day itself. ‘It was a beautiful bright morning when I woke,’ Charles wrote, ‘but clouded over and got cold & inclined to rain very soon.’ Soon, however ‘it blew off & it was a famous marrying morning’.20 The party reassembled: Charles at 7 Suffolk Place, Henry and John a little further down at number 16. The whole party breakfasted together, then Lord George arrived at half-past eleven to collect the clergymen. Carriages came for the ladies, while the gentlemen took advantage of the clear weather and walked, and everyone arrived in good order at St George’s. It is at this point in his narrative, just as everything seemed set for a wonderfully happy conclusion to a love story, that Charles suddenly and inexplicably perceived his sister as a sacrificial victim, watching the crowd press in on her with as much pity as admiratio
n ‘as if she was going to be buried alive’. The impression did not recede: even inside, as the wedding party waited in an anteroom, his sense of unease continued:

  We got to the resting room off St George’s Church, before morning prayers were over, and had to wait a long while, at least 20 minutes before we could begin. It was a very trying time for Cass; for before she came in we had all been talking together & chatting, when as soon as she and my father entered the room there was a dead silence, & everybody was whispering, O here is the bride, here she comes, & were standing on tiptoe to look at her, & the party was so large that the room was thoroughly and very hot.21

  It reads as though, instead of rejoicing with her, those fortunate enough to be present had sensed and echoed the behaviour of the mob outside. With the commencement of the ceremony, however, Charles’s account became more resolutely optimistic:

  It came at last to our turn, & in we all went, & I never saw a better wedding; everything was done with the most proper solemnity, Uncle Henry read it exceedingly well, & all behaved most beautifully. Poor dear Cass could hardly speak at first, but got better as she went on. It was a very prettily dressed and pretty party, & as few tears shed as could be at any wedding. Then as soon as ever we got back to the vestry room there was great fun in distributing favours, & signing names, & kissing the bride, & chatting & laughing & making observations for a long while, till we could get the carriages and be off.22

  Yet, he never quite dispelled or dismissed as fanciful his sense of Cassandra as victim, and the feeling of wellbeing seems to have been short-lived. As soon as they were outside, the sense of foreboding returned. ‘There was an immense crowd to see her go,’ Charles wrote, ‘& as soon as she got in she pulled the blinds down, or she thought were down, but George Hill immediately pulled them up that his bonny bride might be seen, which pleased the mob very much & they cheered them off heartily.’23 The disturbing picture of Cassandra shrinking from the crowd while her husband encouraged their attention seems to anticipate the relatively recent image of the fragile Lady Diana Spencer, struggling on her wedding day with a newly public role.

  Charles’s narrative then moved to more cheerful thoughts on the celebrations following the wedding, with speeches by Lord Downshire and Edward Knight, and the further social embellishment of ‘the chief fashionables added to our party’ including Lord Westmeath, Lady Rosa Nugent, Col. Hill, Col. de Roos, and Charles Gore, all solidly part of the Anglo-Irish ruling class of which Lord George was a member. Yet, they must have served as reminders to her family of the fact that Cassandra was leaving England for what was, effectively, a foreign land. No one appears to have said so: Cassandra’s parting from her family in mid-afternoon ‘of course was sad,’ Charles thought, ‘but still very well sustained, though there were a good many tears shed as we have since heard when they were fairly off’.24 Charles did not say who shed the tears, but went on to record that ‘a good many of us went to Lady Salisbury’s to spend the evening, where we had music & dancing & playing with Hill girls & came hme [sic] & went to bed’.25 It may well have been a very merry gathering: Lady Salisbury was famous, or notorious, for her enthusiastic enjoyment of society.26

  However entertaining the evening, Charles made one telling allusion at the end of his description of the day, to Cassandra’s incomprehensible engagement to Musgrave Harris. ‘The more we know of [Lord George],’ he reflected, ‘the more we feel sure that he will make her happy, and the more we know of all his family the more we have reason to be satisfied with the match.’ ‘And,’ he continued, ‘when we think of what would have been her misery had the other event taken place, how wretched not only she but every one of her family would have been, we cannot but be most thankful that such a shocking thing was averted, and that the only person she has ever loved & who is in every way worthy of her should have got her at last.’27 His relief is palpable, and his joy in her having married the man she loved genuine: no novel could have a happier ending, and yet that sense of unease persists, all through his account. In real life, of course, the story does not end at the wedding. Even in Persuasion, the novel the romance so closely mirrors, Jane Austen adds a sombre, autumnal note at the last, reminding the reader that in this world, even the happiest couple cannot be guaranteed lifelong felicity. For Lord George and Cassandra, as for Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, this was very much an autumnal wedding.

  The next day, the party broke up. Henry, Edward and Charles ‘had a lunch of turtle to eat Cass & George’s health & champagne to wash it down, at the London coffee house, Ludgate Hill’.28 The last thing Charles did was to go with his brother John and Lord George’s brother Lord Marcus Hill to view the remains of the fire. They were, he says, ‘glad to go over it all & see the destruction’.29 The troubling image of the terrible fire beginning and closing his description of Cassandra’s wedding seems to echo the general unease underlying Charles’s account. It is not dispelled by one other peripheral image which is, if not as unsettling, certainly a reminder of something, or someone forgotten; those who left early on the day after the wedding were Cassandra’s elderly father and aunt, the married Knight sisters Fanny and Lizzy, Lizzy’s young daughter – and Marianne, once more excluded from the continuing celebration. Barely thirty-three, like Jane Austen before her she was the maiden aunt, Aunt May, relegated in society to the company of the elderly, the young and the married. At dinner at Godmersham that night Charles, looking about him at the depleted company, commented that May and Lou were ‘the only two Miss Knights now’.30

  The autumn settled in towards winter: ‘the leaves have turned amazingly in the last few days & the high winds have stripped off great numbers’, Charles wrote, as the family began to feel Cassandra’s loss.31 It had been sixteen years since Lizzy’s wedding, and fourteen years since Fanny had married; now Cassandra, who had seemed a permanent part of the rhythm of life at Godmersham, was suddenly absent, and the loneliness of the remaining unmarried siblings and their father was acute. By Christmas, however, to their joy, Lord George and the new Lady George Hill were back with the family, in a pattern of ‘wintering in England’ which they were to follow for the next seven years. They stayed for seven weeks, and were joined for a week in January by Lord George’s brother Lord Downshire and his family, so that their January house party, with its shooting and walking by day and charades in the evening, was even larger than usual. Lord George quickly became part of the family. He went out shooting with Charles, establishing an enduring friendship with him. Over time, they cut down trees on the estate together, walked and rode on two favourite horses, wonderfully named Kildare and The Painter; discussed and exchanged dogs and guns, and, after such merry activities as improvised gymnastics, during which they attempted to walk along a pole (normally used for rolling up carpets) balanced between two chairs, they relaxed in the evenings over cigars and the occasional treat of punch.

  The Hills returned to Godmersham again at the end of August 1835, once more part of all the family activities, including their musical evenings, Lord George practising his singing with Henry and Charles early in the day to be at his best. He was with Charles when he heard of the terrible death by fire of Lady Salisbury in November 1835, and again in early 1836 when news came of Lady Downshire’s final illness; Lord George immediately galloping away on Charles’s horse, The Painter, to catch the coach. In quieter moments, Lord George was able to persuade Charles to undertake some reading on Irish language and history: ‘I read some more of G. Hill’s old book on the ancient history of the Irish, which is full of absurdities,’ Charles wrote in November 1835, ‘but he thinks it is all founded on fact, & I daresay it is.’32

  Cassandra, happy at last, settled back into the old patterns, and it may have seemed to her and to the family that her life would not change a great deal. At first, this was the case and her sisters, especially Fanny, who had helped her choose her trousseau, clearly anticipated a life in Ireland not materially different, if rather more grand, from that which she he had known in E
ngland. An inventory of her wardrobe at the time of her marriage shows comfortable provision of clothing suitable for all occasions – morning calls, walking and riding in the afternoon and attendance at evening soirées:

  24 Day Shifts; 10 Night Shifts; 24 Prs of Drawers; 9 Night Caps; 40 Napkins; 4 Flannel Petticoats; 2 Prs of Stays; 12 Prs Morn. Silk Stockings; 12 Prs Evening ditto; 4 Prs Brown Cotton; 6 Prs Socks; 4 White Dressing Gowns; 1 Short White Ditto; 2 Flannel ditto; 37 Cambric Pocket Handkerchiefs; 12 Morning Petticoats; 6 Evening ditto; 4 Riding Habit Shirts; 4 Prs Riding Drawers; 5 Prs Under Sleeves; 12 Swiss Muslin Handkerchiefs; 4 Smocked Cambric Pelisses; 8 Smocked Muslin ditto; 1 Cambric Chemisette; 6 Dimity Petticoats; 6 Toilette Pincushions.33

  That was simply her underwear. Her morning gowns included ‘1 Lilac Merino’ and ‘1 Lavender Silk’; her evening Gowns ‘1 White Satin, worn on the Wedding Day; 1 Green Velvet; 1 Piqued Blue Satin; 1 Apricot Merino; 1 Moiré Silk’. She had evening shawls in blue, white, cloud and ‘1 mousseline de laine’ which, the list practically reminds, ‘would do for morning as well’. In addition she had a cloak of black satin; a yellow shawl and another of plaid; a hat and habit for riding, and a travelling cap of green velvet. As well as the pink bonnet ‘worn on the Wedding Day with the Grey pelisse’ and the ‘White Blond Veil’, she also had another veil of black Chantilly lace, a bonnet of yellow silk and another of green gauge ribbon. There were bags, thinner shawls, handkerchiefs, mittens of black silk and white thread; morning caps; a ‘Blond Bonnet Cap’; and gloves, both long and short, in white and gold. The list ends with ‘Shoes of all Sorts’.34 Cassandra’s list would have been appropriate for the married life of a gentlewoman in England, and was entirely appropriate for a member of the great Downshire family, accustomed to high society at Hillsborough and Dublin Castle. Indeed, for the first four years of Cassandra’s marriage, her extensive wardrobe was essential, given Lord George’s prominent position.