May, Lou & Cass Read online

  They were still there in early March 1841, and then went back to Ireland to spend the summer, according to their new custom.56 In Charles’s diary for late 1841 and early 1842, however, there is no record of the Hill family’s arriving to winter in England. Another child was expected in March 1842 and Cassandra, for the first and only time, stayed in Ireland for her delivery. Her second daughter and fourth child, Cassandra Jane Louisa Hill, was born at Gartlee, Letterkenny, on 12 March 1842 and Lord George, in great joy and considerable relief, thought his wife ‘wonderfully well’ after the birth.57 Three days later, in a shocking and wholly unexpected repetition of her mother’s fate, Cassandra Knight, of the dark eyes and sweet temper, the little stargazer who longed to stay out all night, was dead, at thirty-five, of puerperal fever.

  Chapter 5: ‘The Manners There’

  Louisa and Lord George

  1842–1849

  ‘... I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as — if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you.’

  PERSUASION

  Suppose that Captain Wentworth, having finally regained Anne Elliot, had found himself a widower less than eight years later; that not war, but the perils of childbirth had separated them. Would he have remarried? Persuasion leaves the question open; Frederick Wentworth insistent on the impossibility of such an event, Anne Elliot less certain.1 Yet, if one may suppose Captain Wentworth to have been left with four young children to bring up alone, and suppose him further to be in a foreign land, a pioneer in a barely-tamed wilderness, what then? This was the situation in which Lord George Hill found himself in March 1842. Like Wentworth, he had waited almost eight years for the woman he wanted to marry, had learned almost too late that she was engaged to another man and had finally married her in her twenty-eighth year with the blessing of both families and all their friends. Within another eight years, he had watched her die in childbirth.

  Lord George was a man of action: in an earlier time he might have been an adventurer, like his ancestor Moyses Hill. In the years before his wife’s death he had found his life’s purpose almost by accident in the bleak but beautiful Gweedore. He had then committed himself to the overhaul not only of a place but of an entire way of life, thinking nothing of commuting weekly from England while his dream was in the process of creation, or of living in a cottage while he sought a family home. He found it not in Gweedore, where he had purchased his estate, but at Ballyare, six miles from Letterkenny, outside the village of Ramelton.2 He knew the task he had set himself in Donegal was difficult: yet, it was the challenge which most attracted him. ‘The district extends for some miles along the N.W. Coast or corner of Ireland,’ he wrote with enthusiasm, describing his work, ‘and the scenery is of the very wildest description; the Atlantic dashing along those shores in all its magnificent freshness, whilst the harsh screeching of the sea-fowl is its continual and suitable accompaniment.’3 At the outset of the 1840s, right in the vanguard of the Victorian age of philanthropic improvement, he adopted a scientific approach and had a complete survey made of the property, then spent three years, from 1841 to 1843, reapportioning the holdings on his twenty-three thousand acres. As Estyn Evans explains:

  Having visited the houses of all his tenants, he gave them ‘notice to quit’ and persuaded them to appoint a committee to assist him in laying out the new farms, though he admits the opposition was ‘vexatious and harrowing’. As an encouragement he instituted a system of premiums for improvements in crops, livestock and housing.4

  He had to compromise: he could not persuade all his tenants to have square or rectangular holdings, and had to settle for long, narrow strip farms to balance out the demand for fair sharing of the varying quality of Gweedore’s land. In addition, by the beginning of 1842, he was on the point of opening a commodious tourist hotel, confident that he could rival or surpass the best he had seen in the Highlands of Scotland. He was forty-one years old, and life could not have been better.

  Then, on 15 March, his wife died, leaving him a widower with four children under seven. He had loved Cassandra deeply, and his shock and grief were very great. Yet, he did not sink into depression, and the letter he wrote to his brother, Lord Downshire, within hours of his bereavement, speaks to his dignified composure:

  I had only time this melancholy morning to inform you of my sad loss — my dearest wife was wonderfully well until Sunday eve — when she got a chill — after that, inflammation set in, which the most vigorous measures could not subdue, & the poor dear creature breathed her last this morning at 11 — The Lord knows what is best for us — & nothing happens but with his permission. It remains for me to submit humbly to his holy will — he has helped me for some years with a most affectionate and faithful wife, & my regret at her being taken from me, is much diminished by the knowledge of the hope that was in her, & I trust she is now happy for ever. I know all your kindness to us & my dearest Cassandra was ever sensible of the affection showed to her by my dear sister and nieces who I know will share my grief — 5

  On the back of this letter is a short but telling note written in Lord George’s hand, reading: ‘Poor Cassandra: Death’. It was the only time Cassandra had not been in England for her confinement. She died, not at Godmersham, with her sisters in attendance and her father and brothers close by, but far away in Donegal. There was no Charles to tiptoe down in the night to check on her welfare, no Louisa or Marianne to comfort her in her distress. Lord George knew what a shock her sudden passing would be for the Knights and Austens, and that there would be, in addition, a terrible familiarity in the news. The uncanny similarity between Cassandra’s death and that of her mother in 1808 would be a severe blow. Thirty-four years later, a chill following childbirth could still mask puerperal fever, and the recent death of Mary Knatchbull Knight could serve only to underline the fact that childbirth remained highly dangerous. Worse still, Cassandra’s family, having received Lord George’s letter with its welcome news of the safety of mother and child, did not know for two days that Cassandra was dead. The first time it is mentioned is in Fanny’s entry for 17 March 1842: ‘On this wretched day we rec’d the account of the death of our beloved Cassandra at Gartlee 15th, 3 days after her confinement! God’s Will be done!’6 She sent an express to Chawton: Edward, George, Charles and Louisa came at once. In what Fanny described as ‘great misery’, they set about making plans. Cassandra had died on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the news arrived, and on Thursday Charles, George and Louisa set off early to take the mail train to Ireland, while Edward went back to Chawton. In a poignant reversion to another time, Fanny’s diary and the letters she forwarded from Lizzy speak of their brother John, though he was thirty-three years old and a Captain in the 6th Dragoon Guards (the Carabiniers) stationed in Newbridge, Kildare, as ‘poor dearest Johnny’, as if he were once again the child in the nursery, even younger and more vulnerable than Cassandra. No account of the funeral, or of Cassandra’s burial in Letterkenny, has survived.7

  Louisa, however, did write to her sisters from Ireland and, though the letters have not been preserved, Fanny’s diary indicates the extent of the grief the family felt. ‘A letter from Mne,’ she wrote on 28 March 1842, ‘enclosing another heartbreaking letter from Louisa at Gortlee [sic].’8 Two days later, another came, followed by a letter from Lizzy ‘enclosing a miserable letter to her from poor dearest Johnny’.9 Fanny continued to receive letters throughout April, including one from Charles. On 7 April, she wrote, ‘Charles arrived from Ireland and spent a miserable evening with me.’10 Charles could not bring himself to mention his youngest sister’s death in his diary, confining himself to one brief, formal entry on Monday 11 April 1842, some days after his return: ‘I have been to Ireland. There is no use writing about that journey of wretchedness. God grant that it may be to my spiritual good and that of all interested in the sa
d event that occasioned it.’11

  Lord George himself was nothing if not stoic. He had two immediate tasks to complete: to consider how best to bring up his four motherless children, and to launch the Gweedore Hotel. He had help and support, not only from his own family, but also, crucially, from the Knights, both at Chawton and Godmersham. For all but one of the children of Edward Austen Knight, the great house of Godmersham in Kent was still home. Their eldest brother Edward, heir to the whole estate, preferred to live in Chawton House, in Hampshire; yet, though a certain coolness had existed between Fanny’s and Edward’s families following his elopement in 1826 with Mary Knatchbull, the Knight and Austen families had not been split by the scandal. In good times and bad, they gathered at Godmersham. It was natural that Lord George, by then so much a part of the Knight family, should go there with his children. By the end of April, Fanny recorded that ‘Lord George and Louisa & the four dear children’ had arrived in London, where she and her husband went to meet them at the Grosvenor Hotel.12 Marianne and her father received the grieving family at the beginning of May, and Fanny had ‘a long miserable letter from poor dear Louisa with an acct of their sad arrival at Godmersham’.13 George Knight arrived in London at Fanny’s house on 10 May, and within a few days he was followed by Lord George, without the children, who stayed with their aunts and grandfather at Godmersham. By 13 May, Fanny wrote, Lord George had ‘called and sat some time with me’.14 When Fanny returned to her home at Mersham le Hatch in Kent, George Knight and Lord George came together to visit.15

  By July 1842, Fanny was able to report that ‘Lord G Hill took Updown and settled there with Louisa & his 4 dear children, the baby Cassandra Jane Louisa being my God-daughter.’16 Updown, close to Lizzy’s home at Dane Court, was also within driving distance of Godmersham, where Fanny met ‘the dear little Hill children’ in August.17 As there was no question of bringing in a stranger to help him with the children, or of entrusting them to the care of servants in Ireland, it gradually emerged that Louisa would assist. It was a practical solution: Fanny had her own children and stepchildren, Lizzy had fifteen children of her own, and Marianne was still fully occupied with the tasks which had devolved to her twenty years earlier, the care of her father and the running of Godmersham. Lord George needed someone who could be in charge of his household. As well as the new baby, the older children – Norah, at six and a half, Arthur, almost five, and Augustus, three – were still very young. They were distressed and bewildered, just as the young Knights had been when their mother died. Louisa simply stayed on: she was still with them at Updown in October 1842, when she rode with Lord George to Mersham le Hatch, and at Christmas, when the Hills joined the Knights at Godmersham.18 It does not appear that the children returned to Ireland during the first year following their mother’s death, though Lord George certainly did. At the time of the first anniversary of Cassandra’s death in March 1843, he visited Fanny in London. He was suddenly and inexplicably taken ill, so that he was unable to travel back to Ireland for some days. By September 1843, Louisa had travelled to Brighton with the children and their father, and they were all still there at the beginning of November.19 Eighteen months later, in May 1845, following the sudden death of Lord George’s brother Lord Downshire after a fall from his horse, the whole family left Godmersham to return to Ireland, and Louisa went with them.20 They stayed that year at Ballyare until December 1845, when they all went to Godmersham to join the Knights.21

  Grief, however, did not cloud Lord George’s business sense, any more than it affected his analysis of the best available childcare. In those years between the death of his wife and the return with Louisa to Ballyare, he worked hard to realise his plans for Donegal. In May 1842, shortly after his arrival at Godmersham, he wrote to his brother Lord Downshire to instruct him on the deposit of monies owing: he had to be sure of his finances, as the hotel, an imposing square white building round a courtyard, overlooking the mountain of Errigal and tranquil lake waters, was within months of opening: a landlord and other staff had to be appointed and furnishings supplied.22 Despite the family tragedy, and despite the fact that the building was not quite complete, the Gweedore Hotel opened for business in the year of Cassandra’s death. Photographs taken later in the century show the hotel when fully developed, but Facts from Gweedore provides a description of it as it appeared in those early days of its first opening:

  The plan of the hotel is well adapted to an exposed situation. The traveller on arriving drives into a courtyard at the back of the house: in one corner is the entrance door, sheltered by a long porch; by this arrangement the three sitting rooms, which occupy the front of the house, are free from draughts, and have the benefit of all the sunshine. There are six bedrooms. The whole of the establishment (including the stables) is fitted up, and furnished with every attention to comfort and convenience. The River Claudy in its course from the Dunluighy Lakes to the sea, flows at the foot of the Hotel Garden, where a boat is provided for the use of visitors who may wish to go to the lake by water, or amuse themselves fishing. A post car is also kept, and mountain ponies can be obtained to assist ramblers in their excursions.23

  On 19 September 1842, an entry in the visitors’ book, known as the Gweedore Hotel Book, comments that though ‘the house is not yet finished and consequently cannot be expected to possess all the advantages of an old established inn ... it is very comfortable — the beds are excellent.’24 The Hotel Book, of which two volumes have survived, provides a remarkable record of the world to which first Cassandra and later Louisa had to adjust. Visitors to ‘the wild Gwydore’, as one early hotel guest termed it, recorded and occasionally illustrated their often colourful experiences, frequently adding their opinions of the state of Ireland in general, and Lord George’s enterprise in particular.25 It is quite unedited and, while largely complimentary, its quota of candid, even blunt remarks provide a useful counterbalance to the uncritical assessment of the enterprise given in Lord George’s own account. As Jane Austen’s Mr Parker points out in Sanditon: ‘Those who tell their own story ... must be listened to with caution.’ Yet, the record of the hotel, though it gives other sides to the story, seems to bear out Lord George’s own belief in the importance of his work in Donegal. One of his first and most supportive visitors, for example, his eldest brother, Lord Downshire, visiting in May 1842, gave weight to his brother’s philanthropic mission in an entry in the Hotel Book:

  I dined and slept last night in this ... inn built by my brother Lord George and have found everything in it, the bed, entertainment very comfortable and I have no doubt the landlord and his wife will continue to deserve the good opinion of their customers and the support and favour of their employer as they are both of them county of Donegal people. I feel an interest in their welfare which must depend on their own merit — this inn has been extremely well-built and is well suited to its situation and I hope that Lord George’s excellent object, that of improving the mountainous district, possessed as it is of many natural advantages, will ere long be crowned with well merited success.26

  Undoubtedly, the hotel made a difference to the district from the outset. One visitor, a naval man who had cause to be grateful for his navigational skills, wrote in 1843 of having been one of a group ‘benighted and nearly lost’ in the area in the early 1830s, when there was neither inn nor road. ‘The night was dark,’ he wrote, ‘their only guide a star, and through forgetting to make allowance for its northing, as it declined, they had deviated from their proper course (being without chart or compass), and had nearly foundered in a sharskin (a shaking bog). What a charming contrast now presents itself to the view!’27

  Lord George put great efforts into making the district accessible. Though a bridge had been built at county expense across the Gweedore River in 1840, no road had been made to enable travellers to make their way to such towns as Dungloe and Bunbeg. Lord George had several miles of bridle roads made through his property, so that visitors were able to reach previously inaccessible areas.28 F
or him, this was a crusade, a civilising mission.29 Lord George saw it as his duty to care for his tenants, just as his brother Downshire, who visited again in 1844 and commended the ‘mutual exertions’ of landlord and tenant, saw it as his duty to care for his own tenants.30A Royal Commission, set up by Sir Robert Peel in 1843 under the chairmanship of Lord Devon to ‘inquire into the state of the law and practice with regard to the occupation of land in Ireland’, declared in its report of 1845 that it was ‘impossible to describe adequately the privations which [cottiers and labourers] and their families patiently endure’.31 Lord George declared himself willing to tackle whatever problem he encountered. ‘I will perform my duty as a landlord,’ he said. ‘I will persevere against all difficulties, I will not be deterred by any opposition I may encounter from my tenants and neighbours, but I will persevere in my attempts to improve the conditions of the people.’ 32 He had grown up with a paternalistic ethic and, when she found herself based in Donegal, Louisa, who understood such an ethic from her own experience of life on the Godmersham estate, threw herself into the moral improvement of the tenants quite as thoroughly as she did into the care of her sister’s children.

  Nonetheless, the cultural shock of her removal to Ireland may have been even greater than it was for Cassandra, who had gone there with all the expectations of a bride. Louisa, already in her thirty-eighth year when her sister died, was ten years older than Cassandra had been when she went to Ireland and, unlike her younger sister, who had spent some time early in her marriage in the relatively familiar society world of Dublin, had no time to ease herself into life in Donegal. Yet, she understood that she would be based there until the children were grown, and did not question it: this was her duty, just as it had been first Fanny’s, then Marianne’s duty to make a commitment to the care of their father and the younger children. Jane Austen had expressed a similar view in Persuasion: ‘If I mistake not,’ Anne Elliot tells Captain Wentworth, ‘a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.’33 Louisa’s new commitment meant that for at least half the year, during the spring and summer which she had always enjoyed with her family in Kent and London, she would now be exiled in Ireland. Unlike Marianne and Fanny who were obliged, while still very young, to become accustomed to the running of a large household, Louisa had comparatively little experience, yet was suddenly mistress of a vast estate, staffed by servants and surrounded by tenants in a foreign country. Moreover, that foreign country was in turmoil.