May, Lou & Cass Read online

  Wintering in England for the second year of her marriage, she was at home in Godmersham for the birth of their first child, Norah Mary Elizabeth, on 12 December 1835. Charles’s diary gives a vivid account of the night Norah was born. He had known since breakfast the day before that his sister was in labour. All that day it continued, ‘and now at night,’ he wrote on the evening of Friday 11 December 1835, ‘she has made but slow progress’. Unable to be of any practical assistance, he went to bed, and his diary tells of the long and anxious night that followed:

  I woke at 4, & it froze as if it was never going to leave off. I could not get to sleep again for thinking of Cass, for I kept hearing moving going on in her room below. At last I got up & crept down to the clock but no one was stirring, so when I was very nearly starved, I came back to bed, & lay waking till 6 when I read ... with no better success. At last old Mag came to light my fire ... & brought the joyful news of d[ea]r Cass’s safety & the birth of a little girl which took place about 2 in the morning. Then I did not sleep much for joy, but still dozed until past 8, when I got dressed & came down to breakfast.35

  Once Cassandra was known to be safe, the new father and his wife’s brother went out shooting, as was usual for them in the morning. It was part of life at Godmersham, and it was a comfort to Cassandra to be at home and have such familiar rituals about her. When Lizzy began her large family, it was natural for first Fanny, then Marianne, then Louisa to go and be with her during her confinements. They did not travel to Ireland to Cassandra, as it was equally natural for her to come home to have her children. Moreover, given the memory of her mother’s sudden death in 1808, she shared her sisters’ apprehension about childbirth. She had reason to be glad of her family, for she was far from well following Norah’s birth. ‘I have not seen Cass for 2 days,’ Charles wrote in his diary at the end of December 1835, adding delicately, ‘She is not well. The babe & she don’t agree exactly. I suppose it will end in a wet nurse.’36 Cassandra did not join the family in the evening until 10 January, and neither she nor the baby ventured out until the end of January. When they did, they did not go out together: ‘It was a beautiful morning,’ Charles noted, ‘and Cass & Norah both took advantage of it, one for the first out of doors airing along the stones by the Portico in the nurse’s arms, the other for the first drive, in the closed carriage, with her husband by her side.’37

  A pattern of dividing their time between the two countries was soon established, and a second child, Arthur Blundell George, was born in England on 13 May 1837. By then, however, Lady Downshire had died, and life had begun to change for Lord and Lady George. Because of a settlement in 1811, the portions due to Lady Downshire’s younger children became due in 1837. Her title and property having gone to her second son, now Baron Sandys, his portion was reduced to £1,000: this meant the two remaining younger brothers, Lord Marcus and Lord George, each received £24,500.38 The immediate impact of this inheritance may not have been appreciated by the Knights, including Cassandra: it was quite sufficient to allow Lord George to leave the military and political path he had been following, and achieve his ambition of owning land in Donegal. As geographer Estyn Evans explains, in his introduction to the only twentieth-century edition of Facts from Gweedore: ‘It seems his family provided him with enough capital to leave Hillsborough and to purchase, from 1838 onwards, some 23, 000 acres of land in the parish of Tullaghobegly West, in the barony of Kilmacrenan, extending northwards along the coast from the Gweedore River.’39 The result was that, by 1838, although her regular visits home continued, Cassandra found herself not the centre of society in Dublin and London, but the wife of a landowner in remote, barely accessible Donegal.

  By then, in England, the world was changing again. In 1837, the young Victoria ascended the throne and, as a new age began, the Knight family faced a number of new concerns. Jane Austen had been dead for twenty years, and now it was her ageing sister and brothers who needed attention. Edward Austen Knight, though in good health, turned seventy in 1837: in January 1838 his brother George Austen, who had been in care since he was a child, died of dropsy at the age of seventy-two, and Cassandra Austen was becoming increasingly frail.40 At Godmersham, too, there were changes. In that same year, 1837, the still unsettled George Knight, Jane’s ‘itty Dordy’, finally met and married a lady of a famous name, Hilaire, Countess Nelson, widow of Lord Nelson’s brother.41 John Knight, now a Captain on half pay, took to spending more time at Godmersham while Charles, who had been so happy at home, began to feel that he should learn to live independently. In 1837, he left to take over the living at Chawton from Mr Papillon, whom Jane had often, teasingly, told her family she would marry.42

  Meanwhile, the rift between Fanny’s husband, Sir Edward Knatchbull, and his daughter continued to widen. It was no nearer resolution when, in 1838, Mary became dangerously ill. Sir Edward showed no sign of relenting, but when Mary wrote to him in desperation, begging him to see her, he did visit her, just once. He had little choice: she was gravely ill of fever following the difficult birth of her seventh child, William Brodnax Knight, on 3 February 1838. Edward Knight wrote to his father-in-law telling him that her fever had returned and then, nineteen days after the birth, to inform him of her death. It was a frightening repetition of the death of Elizabeth Austen in 1808. Just as then, the whole family was deeply shocked: Edward Knight, like his father before him, was plunged into grief. The body was brought to Chawton, and Mary was buried in the family vault. Sir Edward Knatchbull called, for one day, at Chawton Great House on 18 March, a visit as distressing to himself as to Edward Knight. In a strange irony, he was received in Mary’s sitting-room: it was the same Oak Room in which Jane Austen had read to his wife Fanny from Pride and Prejudice, almost exactly twenty-five years before.43

  It was a tumultuous time for the Knights and Knatchbulls, so that Cassandra’s own changing situation in Ireland may not have been uppermost in their minds. In reality, however, from 1838 onward Cassandra’s main home would be in a country of which she and her family knew little. Jane Austen had been so conscious of the cultural differences between the two countries that when her niece Anna, engaged on a novel of her own, had been on the point of sending her fictional family, the Portmans, to Ireland, she had advised her that she ‘had better not leave England ... Let the Portmans go to Ireland,’ she wrote, ‘but as you know nothing of the Manners there, you had better not go with them. You will be in danger of giving false representations.’44 For Cassandra, in marrying the youngest brother of the Marquess of Downshire, there seemed no option but to leave England, though it may not have seemed at first to be a permanent move. The Downshires had considerable properties in England as well as Ireland and, while Lady Salisbury and Lady Downshire lived, additional political influence. It may well have appeared that anything could happen to change Cassandra’s circumstances, and bring her back home to England. The sudden and tragic death of Lady Salisbury in 1835, followed by that of Lady Downshire in 1836 had, however, removed the potential influence of those two formidable women; and the inheritance of more money than he might have had, if his older brother Augustus had not unexpectedly died, made quite a difference to Lord George’s prospects. He had already demonstrated his capacity for patience, and dogged determination. He had carried out his plan of marrying Cassandra Knight after waiting nearly eight years, and now, against the odds, he made his dream of land ownership in Ireland come true. With this money he was at last able, four years after his marriage to Cassandra, to set about his project in Donegal.

  From Lord George’s perspective, all the signs were good. To begin with, he was personable, unassuming in his manners and generally well liked. His decision to visit each tenant personally, and to live on his property as much as possible from the outset, was well, if cautiously received. His knowledge of the Irish language was an advantage, and came as a pleasant surprise to most of his new tenants: ‘It was pleasing and attractive to the people, and brought about an intercourse to which they were unaccustomed,
and they asserted he could not be a lord at all, particularly as he spoke Irish.’45 He needed to gain the confidence of his tenants, for his determination to remove the habit of illegal whisky distillation created suspicion, as did his building of a grain store and harbour at the port of Bunbeg. Some saw these enterprises as improvements, while others feared the loss of established sources of income, whether legal or illegal. The prevalence of illicit distilling of whisky, or poitín, was a problem: it paid, whereas the transport of corn involved a journey of fifty miles to a market, without the prospect of much return. While a police force existed to deal with the problem of illicit distillation, it was less than effective. Lord George’s guide in Gweedore, Sir James Dombrain, considered that the revenue police lacked discipline, as a consequence of the temptations to which they were subject. The establishment of the coastguard in 1821, with Dombrain at its head, was intended to address this, but the officers’ initially aggressive approach proved counter-productive and, in the case of one poitín maker in 1823, fatal. In addition, Dombrain made it clear he did not wish to have his coastguard officers, who were at the time all naval lieutenants, associated with the Revenue: ‘We have no connection with the Revenue Police,’ he stated, ‘and I should be extremely sorry that we should have.’46

  In such a volatile environment, it was an act of either extreme courage or extreme foolhardiness on the part of Lord George to attempt to address the problem by building in the little port of Bunbeg a store for grain, with the capacity to hold up to four hundred tons of oats, and a small quay where ships of up to two hundred tons could load or unload.47

  In addition, he intended to do no less than reorganise the farming system which had been in use for generations, and to replace it with modern, efficient methods. His tenants lived mostly in clusters of dwellings, or clácháns, between the sea and the hills. They supplemented the basic resources of the land by catching fish, including shellfish, and collected seaweed, not only as a foodstuff, but also as a valuable source of manure. When their main farming base was under crop, they practised transhumance, or ‘booleying’: they drove their livestock to the mountains for grazing in summer, and sometimes in autumn to the islands, one of which was Gola, part of Lord George’s estate.48 In a sense, Donegal farmers had their own version of ‘wintering in England’ and were as attached to their established custom as the landlords were to theirs. As Estyn Evans has pointed out, ‘such nomadic habits – the ease with which the cattle could be taken to the safety of the mountains – help to explain the effective resistance of the area to landlordism until the early nineteenth century, and the strength of the opposition to Lord George’s improvements.’49

  For Lord George, having grown up between England and Ireland, the ambivalence of his tenants and the intricate politics of such an ambitious enterprise in Ireland were no surprise. For Cassandra, however, it cannot have been a pleasant discovery. By 1838, she was the mother of two very young children, with a third to come the following March. Nineteenth-century Donegal was quite beyond her experience: it could not have been more different from the countryside to which she was accustomed in Kent and Hampshire. Even if she had been familiar with the politics and the ambiguities of landlord–tenant relations, the geography must have come as a great shock. The roads in north-west Ireland were rough and almost impassable, and it would be some years before the railway would find its way there.50 A letter to his brother Marcus, sent from Dublin in the year following the purchase of his Donegal estate, shows Lord George’s awareness of such issues and obstacles as the ever-present danger of famine and distress, and the consequent dependence of his new tenantry on the caprices of the weather:

  Beautiful weather, which is fortunate. I hear from Donegal that provisions are getting up very much. No doubt there will be great distress if the dry weather continues — for I see in the papers that they are suffering in Mayo and by this misfortune I shall get plenty of hands for my work, and be able to give the people some assistance in their distress.51

  This letter displays the shrewd mixture of the philanthropic and the pragmatic which characterised Lord George’s dealings with his tenants; the work he refers to here is the building of a hotel to attract tourists, the next part of his long-term plan. The distress to which he refers was indeed very great: famine and want were regular occurrences. When he published the results of his work in Gweedore, in 1845, Lord George quoted at length from a pamphlet written in 1837 to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland by the Gweedore National School teacher, Patrick McKye, setting out the extreme poverty of the people of the area:

  They have no means of harrowing their land but with meadow rakes. Their farms are so small that from four to ten farms can be harrowed in one day with a rake. Their beds are straw, green and dried rushes, or mountain bent; their bed clothes are either coarse sheets or no sheets, and ragged, filthy blankets. And more than all that I have mentioned, there is a general prospect of starvation at the present prevailing among them, and that originating from various causes, but the principal cause is a rot or failure of seed in the last year’s crop, together with a scarcity of winter forage, in consequence of a long continuation of storms since October last in this part of the country. So that they, the people, were under the necessity of cutting down their potatoes, and give [sic] them to the cattle to keep them alive. All these circumstances connected together have brought hunger to reign among them, to that degree that the generality of the peasantry are on the small allowance of one meal a day, and many sometimes one meal in three days ... I will venture to challenge the world to produce one single person to contradict any part of my statement.52

  This was the situation Lord George was determined to address as, with excitement and determination, he embarked on the enterprise of his life, a vast project which would occupy him for the rest of his career and earn him as many enemies as friends. Yet, if Lord George was about to set out on this enormous task, so too, whether it was at first obvious to her or not, was Cassandra. The same steely resolution which had prompted him, on his wedding day, to raise the blinds which his nervous bride had drawn down to shield her from the gaze of the mob, now enabled Lord George to look beyond the immediate and disconcerting upheaval which his family might expect. His commitment to them was, however, no less great than his determination to see his project through. Although resolved to live as much as possible on his estate, he did not at first require it of his wife and children. Until he found a house which he judged fit for them to live in, he made the long journey overland and by sea from Kent to Ireland every week, staying in Gweedore in a small house known as Heath Cottage.53 For Cassandra, staying in England could be only a temporary solution. Before long, she could expect to live for at least half the year in Ireland. There, the clothes listed in her wedding inventory would contrast embarrassingly with the pitiful collection of garments possessed by the entire population, at least 4,000 people, of the estate over which she would be mistress. In a very different inventory, Patrick McKye had listed the clothes of the tenantry as part of his 1837 appeal to the Lord Lieutenant:

  None of their either married or unmarried women can afford more than one shift, and the fewest number cannot afford any, and more than one half of both men and women cannot afford shoes to their feet, nor can many of them afford a second bed, but whole families of sons and daughters of mature age are indiscriminately lieing [sic] together with their parents, and all in the bare buff...54

  With such contrasts, Cassandra’s move to Donegal could not be other than a great change, requiring considerable adjustment. Cassandra, however, had demonstrated throughout her life a remarkable capacity for patience, and a considerable degree of courage in facing challenges. Moreover, there was always the prospect of wintering in England. She was not alone in regarding this as her refuge. When Fanny wrote to Miss Chapman in October 1838 of all the family’s whereabouts, she made it clear that she wanted Cassandra and her family to spend more time away from Ireland:

  My dear father is 71 and delightfull
y well. He and Mne and L are now in Hants for a few weeks. George and Lady Nelson are travelling in Germany for his health which is not strong. Charles is settled in the living at Chawton, which is a great comfort to Edwd, & John is at present a Captain on half pay, but soon hoping to get a Commission again. Ld and Ldy George Hill with 2 little children are in Ireland but we hope will return to winter in England ... 55

  They did so. Their third child, Augustus Charles Edward, was born at Godmersham on 9 March 1839. The family stayed again at Godmersham in the winter of 1840–41, Charles Knight in his diary recording for that winter shooting and riding expeditions with Lord George and walks with Cassandra.