Castletown’s Colourful Characters: Lady Sarah Lennox

This post originally featured on the Castletown House blog

By Catherine Bergin-Victory 

‘My dear soul what possessed you?’ a seemingly exasperated Lady Louisa asked her sister Lady Sarah in a letter dated 26 January 1762. Lady Sarah, sister of Castletown’s Lady Louisa Conolly (née Lennox) is, arguably, one of the most colourful characters associated with the house. It is fitting that we mark her today, considering not only is this St Valentine’s Day and she had a most colourful romantic life but also this day marks her birthday. Lady Sarah was born 14^th February 1745.

A print of Lady Sarah Lennox, Print Room at Castletown House.

So what did Lady Sarah do that provoked a reprimand from her older sister? Prepare yourself… Lady Sarah engaged in a flirtation with a gentleman, a Sir Thomas Charles Bunbury!  Unfortunately, there are no details in the letter but it is clear that Lady Sarah was too flirtatious and may have led Bunbury to believe she does not ‘think anything serious’ (about marriage?). For an 18th century lady, that could have been a deadly faux pas!  However, the letter end with some consolation, ever the big sister Lady Louisa signs off hoping that Lady Sarah’s ‘manner to him for the future will regain him’.

Letter from Lady Louisa Conolly to her sister Lady Sarah Lennox

Perhaps, it was no wonder Lady Louisa was keen to see her younger sister married. Lady Sarah, just shy of 17 years at the time of this letter, had already been jilted by George III, courted by several suitors and turned down at least one proposal. As a young 18^th century woman, Lady Sarah was expected to marry, and marry well. Anyone who has ever gone through the first volume of Lady Louisa’s letters to Lady Sarah (available at the OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre at Castletown), will encounter Lady Sarah’s love interests, suitors and her disappointments.

Yet just over a month later, Lady Louisa would write quite a different style of letter, this time enthusiastically congratulating Lady Sarah on her engagement.

Within four months of the first reference to Bunbury, and within one month of serious references to him as a potential husband, Lady Sarah was now an engaged woman. In this romantic of months, and in the same month of her birthday, had Lady Sarah truly met her match?

To find out, we will hold off until 29^th February, choosing this date (it being a leap year!) to turn our attention to marriage!

 

The letters of Lady Louisa Conolly are available for consultation by appointment at the OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre.

Explore Your Archive: The Mystery of Hibbou

Guest post by Deirdre Cullen, Office of Public Works

Hanging in the Healy Room at Castletown House are reproductions of eight grisaille pastel-chalk and gouache drawings, made by the Irish artist Robert Healy while he was staying at the house during the winter of 1768.

Robert Healy sketch of Lady Louisa Conolly and her beloved dog Hibbou, Healy Room, Castletown House

One drawing depicts Lady Louisa Conolly with her horse, groom and her favourite animal companion, a charming small white dog known as ‘Hibbou’. The French for owl is hibou, and undoubtedly the dog’s endearing little face looked rather like an owl’s.

Hibbou also appears in another of the Healy drawings, which portrays three gentlemen wrapped up in scarves and skating on the river Liffey at Castletown on a chilly winter day when the waters had frozen enough to safely bear their weights. The skaters have been identified as Tom Conolly; his brother-in-law James FitzGerald, Duke of Leinster; and Nathaniel Clements, a neighbour from nearby Killadoon House. Running about at their feet is little Hibbou.

Lady Louisa’s letters to her sister Sarah, at the OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre, show that the two young women loved having pets, especially small birds and animals, and that they were particularly partial to woolly dogs, just like Hibbou:

Castletown 30th August 1762

‘My sister Kildare tells me you want a Woly [sic] Dog. I will do all I can to get you a one. There is a white mouse that I wish you had, as I know you love them but as you have so many pretty little birds I don’t suppose you can care for them. Talking of animals, is your squirrel alive?

Robert Healy depicted Hibbou in an ice-skating scene,     Healy Room, Castletown House

Also:

June 1763

‘… that was my bullfinch flying out my window, but I recovered him, and he is now very pert, flying about my room …’

Clearly native wild birds and animals of the kind that inhabited their country estates served the young sisters equally well as pets as did the fashionably-bred woolly dogs they were so keen to acquire. Not long after this, Louisa had secured a little dog which may well have been Hibbou himself:

August 30th 1763

‘I won’t trouble you to keep any of Rose’s puppys for me, as I have got one I like. Lord Newcastle gave me a very handsome Woly Dog the other day …’

Louisa was an attentive mistress, as her letter of 5th February 1768 to Sarah demonstrates, regularly taking her dogs for out for long rambles over the pathways and tracks at Castletown, which she was reconfiguring in the English Landscape style:

‘This is a most lovely day, a white frost, with fine sunshine. I am going out with all the dogs, to take a long trudge all over the place which is such a pleasant thing to do.’

Pets are mentioned again a little later that year, this time at Barton Hall, Suffolk, where Sarah lived with her husband, Sir Charles Bunbury:

Castletown May 3rd 1768

‘I thank you for finishing the half of my work bag; pray send it by the very first opportunity. I am  sure it is beautiful and will make a sweet little screen, just what I now I at present want  prodigiously … I  very much fear it’s being be left in the Drawing Room at Barton, at the mercy of Laure or her kittens or some puppys who will be-devil it …’

Louisa mentions Hibbou on several occasions in her letters to Sarah:

Castletown May 8th 1768

‘I have always forgot to tell you that Mrs Hibbou  is near lying in, if you chuse to have one of the puppies I will keep the prettiest for you. Hibbou is perter and more sensible and more ridiculous than ever, ‘tis a dear dog.’

Letter from Lady Louisa Conolly to Lady Sarah Lennox discussing Hibbou, 8 May 1768

Letter 8 May 1768, continued.

‘Mrs Hibbou’ was presumably Hibbou’s mate. Later on in May he was still charming his mistress:

Castletown May 25th 1768

‘Hibbou desires his duty, just now he saw me put on my hat which rejoiced him, as he knows ‘tis to go out; he is very impatient.’

But by June, misfortune had struck as Hibbou had strayed or been lost, and on 7th June 1768, Louisa writes:

‘I have never found poor Hibbou.’

It’s unlikely we will ever know what happened to this little white woolly dog depicted so affectionately by the young artist for his wealthy patrons while he stayed at Castletown early in 1768, but Louisa’s letter to her sister Sarah leaves us with the poignant image of his mistress searching for him diligently, but in vain, as she trudged about her beautiful demesne.

 

The Conolly archive is available for consultation at Castletown House.

For more information contact:

Email: omarc@mu.ie    Telephone: 01-6544222

18th century coffee culture from the letters of Lady Louisa Conolly

By Nicola Kelly, Archivist, OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre

 

The habit of coffee drinking first became popular in Europe early in the 17th century and the first coffee house was opened in Oxford at The Angel in 1650. Over the next two hundred years coffee houses flourished in cities such as London, Paris and Vienna, acting as informal meeting places where information was exchanged through conversation and print.

According to a pamphlet, the ‘women’s petition against coffee’ of 1674, coffee made men ‘as unfruitful as the sandy deserts, from where that unhappy berry is said to be brought.’

Despite some of these objections, coffee houses blossomed, over 2,000 having been set up in London by 1700. Literary contemporaries described clergymen snug in coffee houses penning sermons; doctors used them for consultations. Dublin’s earliest coffee houses were opened in the late 17th century, and remained popular throughout the 18th century. The fashion also spread to county towns and in 1698, coffee houses were to be found throughout Ireland’s larger cities. Some coffee houses transformed into the gentlemen’s clubs that appeared in London, Paris and Dublin in the 17th century. These clubs originally met in coffee houses, then taverns, until later proprietary clubs became fashionable.

Coffee houses have long been linked with social and political change, in the era of Enlightenment were considered an alternative gathering place, and took over the role that taverns had long played. By offering a choice of drinks, and often sweets, at a fixed price and in a more civilized setting than most taverns provided, coffee houses and cafes were part of the rise of the modern restaurant.

Merchants whose businesses revolved around the Custom House frequented two of Dublin’s busiest coffee houses: The Little Dublin and The Exchange in Crampton Court. When the Royal Exchange (now City Hall) opened in 1779, it included a coffee room on the first floor. It extended ‘from one stair-case to the other, almost the whole length of the north front, and its breadth is from the front to the dome: In point of magnificence, it is perhaps equal to any coffee-room in Great Britain: It receives its lights by the windows in the north front, and by oval lanterns in the flat of the ceiling, which is highly ornamented, and from which is suspended a grand lustre’.

Although the majority of coffee houses appeared in Europe’s larger cities, among our collections, is a letter from the Conolly archive in which Lady  Louisa Conolly refers to a Coffee Room at Castletown House, Celbridge, Co. Kildare. The letter is dated 19 January 1766, Lady Louisa in a letter to her sister Lady Sarah Lennox writes;

‘She has an aversion to a Coffee room, and thinks it so wicked a thing that our having one here shocks her prodigiously, and with the other circumstance of my not having children, she does not like me at all.’

Lady Louisa Conolly refers to her Coffee Room, 1766

This offers insights into the growth and popularity of the coffee trade in Ireland particularly among the landed gentry, however, it is unusual that one features in an estate like Castletown, commissioned by Lady Louisa, as conversation in coffee houses typically revolved around business and politics, serving as well springs of gossip, political intrigue and faction, and were thought improper places for women. Lady Louisa frequently discusses politics in letters to her sister Lady Sarah Lennox, she writes ‘alas, the bill for the Augmentation of Troops, was thrown out by four voices; – he interested himself very much for it, and spoke, but all would not do, so poor Ireland, will, I am afraid, go to the next French war!’, and observing also ‘you must know that I am a great Politician with regard to Ireland’ (8 May 1768). It could be speculated that Lady Louisa discussed such topics among intimate circles of friends in her coffee room!

The Conolly archive is available for consultation at the OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre

For further details about this collection please contact the Centre:

Email: omarc@mu.ie      Telephone: 01-6544222

Further reading:

PP/CON2/2 Letters of Lady Louisa Conolly, Conolly Archive, OPW-Maynooth University Archive and Research Centre, Castletown House.

Pamphlet, ‘The women’s petition against coffee : representing to publick consideration the grand inconveniencies accruing to their sex from the excessive use of that drying, enfeebling liquor’ (London, 1674)

Robert Pool, John Cash, Views of the most remarkable public buildings, monuments and edifices in the city of Dublin, (Dublin, 1780)

M. Mac Con Iomaire, Coffee Culture in Dublin: A Brief History. in M/C Journal – A Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 15, No.2 (2012)