May, Lou & Cass Page 16

  During that year, Lord George divided his time between Ireland and England in his efforts to relieve the distress of his tenants.61 ‘I will … send you another paper about the present distress in Ireland which Ld. George Hill has been an eyewitness to,’ Fanny wrote to Miss Chapman at the end of November 1846. ‘You will see he is on the Committee of Relief & he has sent over £500 worth of meal to be stored at Gweedore on trust as the necessity is too pressing to wait. We have collected a little, & I believe much has been given, but every trifle is of assistance.’62 By mid-January 1847, this second appeal for funds, this time not for the building of a schoolhouse, but for simple famine relief, was in circulation:

  DISTRESS AT GWEEDORE

  In soliciting aid on behalf of the famishing Poor of the Gweedore district, the population of which exceeds 3,000 souls, those benevolent persons who have contributed to this object are requested to accept the most grateful and heartfelt acknowledgements for the aid already offered, and which has been husbanded with the most rigid economy, attention is now directed to the following facts:

  The people are all of them in a starving condition, few having more than one scanty meal in the twenty-four hours. On this account, together with the very unwholesome nature of the food, severe Dysentery has broken out, and is daily hurrying numbers into eternity.

  There are, as yet, no Public Works going on, and when they are proceeded with, only a limited number of hands will be employed.

  These are trying circumstances; and it is well worthy of observation, that while in some parts of Ireland the most alarming outrages are daily being perpetrated, here, under hardships and sufferings of no common kind, the greatest patience is exhibited. The poor people have already — at a great disadvantage — disposed of the few sheep they possessed; numbers have, long since, sold their Cows; but now, from the unhealthy and weak condition of those remaining, caused by want of food, no purchasers are to be found. The prospect wears a gloomy and dismal aspect, and what adds to it is the certainty that next winter will, if possible, be much worse than the present, unless some means for tilling and sowing this ground be afforded.

  LORD GEORGE A. HILL who possesses property here to a considerable extent has, ever since he purchased the Estate, been in the habit of spending yearly, double, or more than double, the amount of his Rents in promoting the happiness and welfare of the tenantry, but this year it would be utterly impossible for one individual to meet the wants of so large a population without some assistance; hitherto, provisions have been brought in by his Lordship and sold to all around, without exception, at a considerable sacrifice; but the stock is at an end. This appeal, then, is made to the sympathies of a kind and benevolent Public, to enable the people to purchase Indian Meal at the Government stores, at a reduced price.

  – Subscriptions will be most thankfully received and acknowledged by LORD GEORGE A. HILL, Gweedore, Dunfanaghy, Ireland; or by the Rev. Samuel O’Neill Cox. January 11 1847.63

  This appeal was in keeping with government policy in the early part of the famine,whereby public works would ensure that the needy could earn money to buy food: the government’s unwillingness to take direct responsibility for maintaining these public works, already voiced by the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, placed a great responsibility on voluntary organisations and on voluntary subscription. It was not until January 1847 that this policy was altered; by the spring of that year, public works had been replaced by direct outdoor relief, and with the introduction of soup kitchens, some three million people were subsisting by mid-1847 on what was provided by public expense.64

  A revealing fragment of a letter from Louisa to Fanny in the winter of that year, describing the misery of the Gweedore tenants, demonstrates her genuine compassion for their sufferings. Unfortunately, it also shows her utter inability to comprehend their unwillingness to go to the workhouse, the last resort for the poor.65 It was not simply that the Poor Law Unions had much larger units than in Great Britain: there was, to make matters worse, horrific overcrowding. Ironically, because the Poor Law Extension Act of 1847 refused relief to anyone owning more than quarter of an acre, to qualify for the poorhouse meant destitution, and almost certainly, death:

  Ld George did not get sufficient [funds] ... to build a Glebe House and Church & and the latter is obliged to be given up — the Glebe House is nearly completed & the Cleggmore rector and his wife & 3 children hope to leave their present makeshift house at Bunbeg for their new mansion. The school house in which there is service every Sunday is being enlarged 14 feet to accommodate the enlarged congregation — the utter wretchedness of the poor children about here is miserable to see — but as all need clothing in the same degree and it is impossible to clothe three thousand we are obliged to do nothing in that way — added to this it would do very little good — for they will neither [dress] the children in the clothes or [sic] mend them & had rather go about in dirt & filth than go to the Poor House & be fed & clothed & have the children educated — there are of course a few exceptions, some who really strive to learn & do better — but this last year of bad suffering & privation has destroyed their energies & produced a kind of torpor which comprehends nothing.66

  Louisa’s resistance to the tenants’ point of view was not unique to her. As J.C. Beckett points out, ‘the widespread sympathy with the sufferings of the Irish poor was not unmingled with impatience, and sometimes with contempt’.67 A sense of this is conveyed in an entry written in the Gweedore Hotel Book by Louisa’s brother, John Knight, during September 1847:

  The comfort and interior economy of this inn is equal to its outward appearance which in my experience is high praise, for a more substantial well built or commodious house with stable byre & etc it would be difficult to find anywhere, & impossible I should imagine in any other part of Ireland of so wild a character as this. It is, in fact, a fair sample of the Lord George Hill’s doings in Donegal, which have effected such an extraordinary revolution in the space of a few years in the habits of the people & the appearance of the Country, substituting cleanliness & industry for sloth & dirt — & changing bogs, rocks & heather into cornfields & potatoes farmland, that one scarcely knows whether most to admire or wonder at the transformations we behold ... 68

  John seems fairly dismissive, if not outright contemptuous of the tenantry in Gweedore. Yet, this bears out Jane Austen’s observation of 1814: her family did not, and could not, comprehend the cultural differences between the two countries. Fanny’s view, unsurprisingly, was that famine had simply interrupted the good work of conversion, as she wrote to Miss Chapman at the height of the distress in 1847:

  With regard to the Gweedore affairs, I am sorry to say the dreadful famine of last winter obliged Ld. G. Hill to apply all his resources to keeping the people alive, & while the work has continued to progress slowly it has not gone on as it had done, had not this sad state of things occurred. I will ask him to tell me for your information exactly what progress has been made, & what there is yet to do.69

  Lord George had indeed put every effort into relief, commuting at a frenetic pace from England back to Ireland, even while his family were settled at Godmersham. In the middle of the crisis, however, he had another, very pressing matter which required his full attention.

  On 11 May 1847, Lord George Hill was married to Miss Louisa Knight of Godmersham, Kent.

  It was no whirlwind romance, yet, though their decision to marry came as no surprise to Fanny, the union had been almost as difficult to achieve as Lord George’s marriage to Cassandra. ‘My sister Louisa’s marriage was a great joy to us,’ Fanny wrote to Miss Chapman, ‘when it was found possible to accomplish it.’ The difficulty centred on an Act of Parliament, passed several years before, making it illegal on grounds of consanguinity for a man to marry in England the sister of his deceased wife. As a consequence, Lord George and Louisa had to be married abroad, as Fanny went on to explain to Miss Chapman:

  She had been devoted to those 4 dear little children & had never left the
m since their own dear Mother’s death & it was not surprising that an attachment had grown up between Lord George and herself, but until the last year it had been believed impossible that a marriage should take place with a wife’s sister since the passing of Lord Lyndhurst’s Act ... — the question however was brought forward again amongst Lawyers, & as you probably know the Queen’s Commissioner now issued ... to try it — meanwhile as my Father & most of our family (including Ld G and Ld D) felt convinced that there is no Divine or Moral Law against it, & as England is the only country in which it is not legal, it was determined that they should go to Denmark where no doubt exists, & there the marriage was celebrated. My Aunt Louisa & brother John accompanied them & they staid a few weeks at Godmersham after their return home & then went with the children to Ireland, where they have been ever since the middle of June at Ballyare House near Rathmelton in the County of Donegal, which is Lord George’s place & is about 18 or 20 miles from Gweedore, the seat of his labours, & where he goes constantly for a few days at a time to superintend the prosecution of his benevolent plans.70

  This wedding was a very different occasion from the grand affair of 1834 at St George’s, Hanover Square: Charles, who had written in such precise detail of that wedding, was not even present when Louisa married. His diary for May 1847 records only a brief, unembellished entry, written a full week after the marriage, following a dinner with his brother Edward in Chawton House: ‘Heard of G. Hill & Lou being married.’71 He expressed no joy, and no opinion. Yet, he had been very close to Louisa all his life, and especially so when they both lived at Godmersham: she cut his hair, read German and dissected wildlife with him, rode with him on the railway, partnered him in charades and once, to his considerable mortification, presented him with a baffling birthday present of three bars of soap. ‘I daresay I am not of a clean habit,’ Charles had written at the time, with more than a suggestion of injured pride, ‘or else I can’t imagine why anybody should give me 3 bars of soap.’72 Louisa once knew him well enough to suggest an improvement in his personal hygiene: yet, he was not informed of her wedding until a week after it had occurred, and then only through Edward, at once the most detached of their brothers and the one most likely to understand, through early and bitter experience, what it was to be in an unconventional marriage in that family. One possible explanation for Charles’s cool reaction is that he, unlike Fanny and most of the family, did not approve of the marriage.73 Apart from his many scruples over details of doctrine and morality, a source of continuing unease to him, he was not in favour of second marriages, and had been far from enthusiastic when his widowed brother Henry married Charlotte Northey in 1836. ‘Not a first wife – not the wife of his heart,’ he had written then, ‘for she is gone, but only one that will do.’ 74 If that was his view about Henry’s wife, it is entirely possible that Charles felt the same about his friend Lord George’s second marriage, despite the fact that the new bride was his own dear sister, Lou.75

  Whatever the opinion of the brother to whom she had always been closest, or of the Houses of Parliament, Louisa was now Lady George Hill. There was no prolonged honeymoon, however – there was too much work to do. ‘I hear of course from my sister constantly,’ wrote Fanny to Miss Chapman, ‘and am happy to say that accounts are good as to the crops & the condition of the people at present & now that relief committees & soup kitchens are established in every district, we may hope that no such misery as existed last winter will occur again.’ Fanny, too, continued on her mission to promote the sale of Facts from Gweedore: ‘I am now negotiating the sale of 6000 pair of Gweedore socks & stockings, which [Lord George] has on hand, knit by his own people, all of which he buys from them & disposes of as he can.’76

  For the Knights, the wedding of Lord George and Louisa signalled a significant change. Edward Austen Knight was not far from eighty years old, and felt keenly the loss of another daughter to the unknown country of Ireland for, after 1847, committed to her husband and the nieces and nephews who were now her stepchildren, she was no longer a Knight of Godmersham. ‘My dear Father felt parting with Louisa very much,’ Fanny wrote, ‘& so did we all, but it was impossible for Lord George to remain longer away from his property & people & of course his wife & children must accompany him.’77

  In political terms, the marriage caused something of a unwelcome stir, and within five years it would be the subject of discussion in the House of Lords, to establish the position of such controversially married couples in society, and to discuss the legal position of any children who might be born to them.78 In the mid-1840s however, Lord George was being commended in the House of Commons for his work in Gweedore.79 It was on the strength of this fame that the celebrated author Thomas Carlyle, former hero of the young idealists who had founded The Nation, made a visit to Gweedore during his journey to Ireland in 1849.

  ‘Ireland really is my problem,’ he wrote in his journal for May of that year, ‘the breaking point of the huge suppuration which all British and all European society is.’80 For the Irish people themselves, he had as little regard as John Knight: ‘Beggars, beggars; only industry really followed by the Irish people,’ he wrote in August 1849.81 On his way from John Hamilton’s estate to his appointment with Lord George, he commented without enthusiasm on the ‘bare miserable country – moor, moor, brown heather, and peat-pots, here and there a speck reclaimed into bright green’. He transferred to hired transport for the road to Letterkenny, and began his journey to Lord George’s house at Ballyare, outside Ramelton, recording his impressions in his own inimitable and idiosyncratic style:

  Fourteen miles; a tilled country mostly, not deficient here and there in wood; ragged still, tho’ greatly superior to late wont; recognize the Ulster dialect of carman, Ulster practice of the population generally. Talk — burdensome, had there been much of it? Mountains about Gweedore, details (eulogistic, enthusiastic) of Lord George Hill; three men (officialities, of some kind) — excise or other with dish-hats, before us in their car; road now rapidly winding downwards: pass them at last; can bethink of no other road-fellow whatever. Country greenish for most part, with gnarled crags; I should have expected ferns in the ditches, but don’t remember them. Millpond at the bottom of our descent, then long slow ascent up Letterkenny Street, broad, sometimes rather ragged-looking, always idle-looking, — busy only on market days, with corn and cattle, I suppose. Hotel at last; and carman satisfied, a grateful change into Lord George’s car. To Ballyarr [sic] then! Now towards 6 or 7 o’clock. Long, mile-long straight steep ascent; then complex cross roads ‘to Rathmelton’ … country commonplace, hill-and-dale, not quite bare; at length Ballyarr [sic], clump of wood; high rough hedges, gates, farm-looking place; and round the corner of some offices we come to an open smooth kind of back court, with low piazza at the further side ...82

  Suddenly, he beheld Lord George and had a first glimpse of Louisa, his descriptions giving a rare insight into their family life at Ballyare. His picture of Louisa may be all the more revealing because he did not know, and never realised, that the quiet lady whose name he could neither retain nor recall, was the niece of Jane Austen. Lord George was, in August 1849, only forty-seven years old, and Louisa three years his junior; yet Carlyle saw a rather elderly, if elegant couple:

  From below piazza, — then at the back entrance, (the only handy one to his mansion) Lord George himself politely steps out to welcome us. Handsome, grave-smiling man of 50 or more; thick, grizzled hair, elegant club nose, low cooing voice, military composure and absence of loquacity; a man you love at first sight. Glimpse of Lady (Georgina?) Hill, a nun-like elderly lady, and of one or two nice silent children; silent small elegant drawing-room; a singular silent politeness of element reigns; at length refection in a little dining room, (tea, I suppose?) — and, in a bare but clean and comfortable room, presided over by the Great Silences, one sinks gratefully asleep.83

  It is a strange, almost ghostly scene: the only vibrant character in it is Lord George himself, while Louisa and th
e children seem like pale ghosts, and the ‘Great Silences’ sound not tranquil, but unnatural. The eldest of Cassandra’s four children, thirteen-year-old Norah, whose birth in the middle of a winter night had caused Charles such anxiety in 1835, would spend the spring and summer of the following year at Godmersham; accounts of her there show a lively, sociable child.84 Arthur, her next eldest brother, was twelve, his brother Augustus ten and the youngest, Cassandra Jane Louisa, was six years old. Moreover, there was that year a new addition to the family: Louisa, at forty-four, had been fortunate to be safely delivered of a son. A delicate child, he had his father’s name, George, and his middle name, Wandsbeck, commemorated the place of his parents’ marriage. It seems odd that not one of the children disturbed the pervading silence. It makes a strange, unsettling contrast with the charades and music of Godmersham, in which Lord George and Louisa had once played so enthusiastic a part. Carlyle, however, appreciated the quiet, and enjoyed the next day:

  Gweedore ... like an unopened scroll lying before — I bethink me, we walked out too, that evening, Lord George ... and I, with pleasant familiar talk; and for supper after our return, he ordered me Irish stirabout, a frightful parody of ‘Scotch porridge,’ (like hot dough) which I would not eat and even durst not except in semblance..85

  He was glad the following morning not to have to face any more of it. Louisa was not present at breakfast, Carlyle wrote, struggling once more to remember what she was called, and making a gallant attempt to attribute to her Lord George’s middle name: ‘Dim, moist morning, pleasant breakfast (Lady Augusta (?) who has a baby, not there), paternal wit of Lord G. with his nice little modest boys and girls in English, German, French.’86 It comes as a relief to see that the children talked at breakfast, and in several languages. Carlyle then went from Ballyare with Lord George to see Gweedore. He admired the hotel, the mill and quay, despised the ‘ghastly staring new Catholic chapel’ and, though he was mightily disapproving of the ‘dark barbarians’, Lord George’s tenants, he was greatly impressed with his host’s care of them: ‘Lord George knows all these people; speaks kindly, some words in Irish or otherwise, to everyone of them.’87