Kitabı oku: «The Duchess»
The Duchess
GEORGIANA:
DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE
AMANDA FOREMAN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
Family Trees
Part One: Débutante
1 Debutante: 1757–1774
2 Fashion’s Favourite: 1774–1776
3 The Vortex of Dissipation: 1776–1778
4 A Popular Patriot: 1778–1781
5 Introduction to Politics: 1780–1782
Part Two: Politics
6 The Cuckoo Bird: 1782–1783
7 An Unstable Coalition: 1783
8 A Birth and a Death: 1783–1784
9 The Westminster Election: 1784
10 Opposition: 1784–1786
11 Queen Bess: 1787
12 Ménage à Trois: 1788
13 The Regency Crisis: 1788–1789
Part Three: Exile
14 The Approaching Storm: 1789–1790
15 Exposure: 1790–1791
16 Exile: 1791–1793
17 Return: 1794–1796
18 Interlude: 1796
19 Isolation: 1796–1799
Part Four: Georgiana Redux
20 Georgiana Redux: 1800–1801
21 Peace: 1801–1802
22 Power Struggles: 1802–1803
23 The Doyenne of the Whig Party: 1803–1804
24 ‘The Ministry of All the Talents’: 1804–1806
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Notes
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
Biographers are notorious for falling in love with their subjects. It is the literary equivalent of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, the phenomenon which leads hostages to feel sympathetic towards their captors. The biographer is, in a sense, a willing hostage, held captive for so long that he becomes hopelessly enthralled.
There are obvious, intellectual motives which drive a writer to spend years, and sometimes decades, researching the life of a person long vanished, but they often mask a less clear although equally powerful compulsion. Most biographers identify with their subjects. It can be unconscious and no more substantial than a shadow flitting across the page. At other times identification plays so central a role that the work becomes part autobiography as, famously, in Richard Holmes’s Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1995).
In either case, once he commits himself to the task, the writer embarks on a journey that has no obvious route for a destination that is only partly known. He immerses himself in his subject’s life. The recorded impressions of contemporaries are read and re-read; letters, diaries, hastily scribbled notes, even discarded fragments are scrutinized for clues; and yet the truth remains maddeningly elusive. The subject’s own self-deception, mistaken recollections, and the hidden motives of witnesses conspire to make a complete picture impossible to assemble. Finally, it is intuition and a sympathy with the past which supply the last missing pieces. It is no wonder that biographers often confess to dreaming about their subjects. I remember the first time Georgiana appeared to me: I dreamt I switched on the radio and heard her reciting one of her poems. That was the closest she ever came to me; in later dreams she was always a vanishing figure, present but beyond my reach.
Such profound bonds have obvious dangers, not least in the disruption they can inflict upon a biographer’s life. Sometimes the work suffers; its integrity becomes jeopardised when, without realising it, a biographer mistakes his own feelings for the subject’s, ascribing characteristics that did not exist and motives that were never there. In his life of Charles James Fox, the Victorian historian George Trevelyan insisted that Fox held to a strict code of morality regarding the sexual conquest of aristocratic women; he only seduced courtesans. Trevelyan, perhaps, had such a code, but Fox did not. There is ample evidence to suggest that the Whig politician had several affairs with married women of quality, including Mrs Crewe and possibly Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Her first biographer, Iris Palmer, was similarly wishful in her description of Georgiana as a ‘simple woman’ without ambition except in her desire to help others. Palmer also claimed, in the face of contrary evidence, that Georgiana was only unfaithful to her husband with one man, Charles Grey. Both biographers illustrate how easy it is to fall prey to the temptation to suppress or ignore unwelcome evidence.
Fortunately, the emotional distance required to construct a narrative from an incoherent collection of facts and suppositions provides a powerful counterbalance. By deciding which pieces of the puzzle are the most significant – not always an easy task – and thereby asserting their own interpretation, the biographer achieves a measure of separation. The demands of writing, of style, pace and clarity, also force a writer to be more objective. Numerous decisions have to be made about conflicting evidence, or where to place the correct emphasis between certain events. Having previously dominated the biographer’s waking and sleeping life, the subject gradually diminishes until he or she is contained on the page.
I discovered Georgiana in 1993, while researching a doctoral dissertation on English attitudes to race and colour in the late eighteenth century. I was reading a biography of Charles Grey, later Earl Grey, by E. A. Smith, and came across one of her letters. I was already familiar with Georgiana’s career as a political hostess and as the duchess who once campaigned for Charles James Fox, but I had never read any of her writing, and knew little of her character. I was struck by her voice, it was so strong, so clear, honest and open, that she made everything I subsequently read seem dull by comparison. I lost interest in my doctorate, and after six months I had read just one book on eighteenth-century racial attitudes. Whenever I did go to the library it was to look for biographies of Georgiana.
There have been three previous biographies about her, all of them remarkably similar. Iris Palmer’s The Face without a Frown, written in 1944, was a novelization of Georgiana’s early life. It made no claim to be a historical biography, although Palmer did quote from Georgiana’s letters. The other two, The Two Duchesses, by Arthur Calder-Marshall (1978), and Georgiana, by Brian Masters (1981), also concentrated on her early life. Both Calder-Marshall and Masters were probably influenced by the edited selection of Georgiana’s letters, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, published by the Earl of Bessborough in 1955. (It was only much later that I discovered the extent of Lord Bessborough’s editing for myself.) None of the books, not even the Bessborough edition of her letters, portrayed the Georgiana whose voice I felt I had heard. Eventually I realized I would never be satisfied until I had followed the trail to its source. Oxford accepted my explanation and graciously allowed me to start again and begin a new D.Phil, on Georgiana’s life and times. A short while later I decided to write her biography in addition to the doctorate.
As Georgiana’s letters are scattered around the country, I planned to be on the road for eighteen months and set off in the summer of 1994, having finally passed my driving test on the seventh attempt. My fears about starting a new project were subsumed by the act of driving on the motorway for the first time. I began my search at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, Georgiana’s home during her married life. Its archives, hidden away inside a subterranean labyrinth of corridors, contain over 1,000 of her letters. They revealed so much of her daily life that it seemed as though I were watching a play from the corner of the stage. The impression of being an invisible, perhaps even an uninvited, spectator remained with me throughout my research.
The ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ came upon me suddenly, and I was caught even before I noticed it happening. One day in the Public Record Office at Kew, while reading a vicious letter from one of Georgiana’s rivals, I found myself becoming furious on her behalf. This was the beginning of my obsession with Georgiana, fuelled by frustration at the empty spaces in the Chatsworth archives where someone had either destroyed her letters or censored them with black ink. It only began to wane after I had filled in the missing days and months in Georgiana’s life from other sources: the archives at Castle Howard, private collections, the British Library, and libraries and record offices all over Britain.
By the time I had consigned Georgiana to the page a different picture of her had emerged. Previous accounts portrayed her as a charismatic but flighty woman; I see her as courageous and vulnerable. Georgiana indeed suffered from the instability which often accompanies intelligent and sensitive characters. She was thrust into public life at the age of sixteen, unprepared for the pressures that quickly followed and unsupported in a cold and loveless marriage. Though most of her contemporaries adored her because she seemed so natural and vibrant, only a few knew how tormented she was by self-doubt and loneliness. Georgiana was not content to lead the fashionable set nor merely to host soirées for the Whig party, instead she became an adept political campaigner and negotiator, respected by the Whigs and feared by her adversaries. She was the first woman to conduct a modern electoral campaign, going out into the streets to persuade ordinary people to vote for the Whigs. She took advantage of the country’s rapidly expanding newspaper trade to increase the popularity of the Whig party and succeeded in turning herself into a national celebrity. Georgiana was a patron of the arts, a novelist and writer, an amateur scientist and a musician. It was her tragedy that these successes were overshadowed by private and public misfortune. Ambitious for herself and her party, Georgiana was continually frustrated by restrictions imposed on eighteenth-century women. She was also a woman who needed to be loved, but the two people whom she loved most – Charles Grey and the Duke of Devonshire’s mistress Lady Elizabeth Foster – proved incapable of reciprocating her feelings in full measure. Georgiana’s unhappiness expressed itself destructively in her addiction to gambling, her early eating disorders, and her deliberate courting of risk. Her battle to overcome her problems was an achievement equal to the triumphs she enjoyed in her public life.
Georgiana’s relationships with men and women cannot be categorized by twentieth-century divisions between what is strictly heterosexual and homosexual. Nor did she think about the rights of women or entertain the same notions of equality that characterize modern feminism. It would be foolish to separate Georgiana from her era and call her a woman before her time; she was distinctly of her time. Yet her successful entry into the male-dominated world of politics, her relationship with the press, her struggle with addiction, and her determination to forge her own identity make her equally relevant to the lives of contemporary women. In writing this book, I hope that her voice is heard once more, by a new generation.
Family Trees
PART ONE Débutante
1Débutante1757–1774
‘I KNOW I was handsome … and have always been fashionable, but I do assure you,’ Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, wrote to her daughter at the end of her life, ‘our negligence and ommissions have been forgiven and we have been loved, more from our being free from airs than from any other circumstance.*1 Lacking airs was only part of her charm. She had always fascinated people. According to the retired French diplomat Louis Dutens, who wrote a memoir of English society in the 1780s and 1790s, ‘When she appeared, every eye was turned towards her; when absent, she was the subject of universal conversation.’2 Georgiana was not classically pretty, but she was tall, arresting, sexually attractive and extremely stylish. Indeed, the newspapers dubbed her the ‘Empress of Fashion’.
The famous Gainsborough portrait of Georgiana succeeds in capturing something of the enigmatic charm which her contemporaries found so compelling. However, it is not an accurate depiction of her features: her eyes were heavier, her mouth larger. Georgiana’s son Hart (short for Marquess of Hartington) insisted that no artist ever succeeded in painting a true representation of his mother. Her character was too full of contradictions, the spirit which animated her thoughts too quick to be caught in a single expression.
Georgiana Spencer was born at Althorp, outside Northampton, on 7 June 1757, the eldest child of the Earl and Countess Spencer.† She was a precocious and affectionate baby and the birth of her brother George, a year later, failed to diminish Lady Spencer’s infatuation with her daughter. Georgiana would always have first place in her heart, she confessed: ‘I will own I feel so partial to my Dear little Gee, that I think I never shall love another so well.’3 The arrival of a second daughter, Harriet, in 1761 did not alter Lady Spencer’s feelings. Writing soon after the birth, she dismissed Georgiana’s sister as a ‘little ugly girl’ with ‘no beauty to brag of but an abundance of fine brown hair’. The special bond between Georgiana and her mother endured throughout her childhood and beyond. They loved each other with a rare intensity. ‘You are my best and dearest friend,’ Georgiana told her when she was seventeen. ‘You have my heart and may do what you will with it.’4
By contrast, Georgiana – like her sister and brother – was always a little frightened of her father. He was not violent, but his explosive temper inspired awe and sometimes terror. ‘I believe he was a man of generous and amiable disposition,’ wrote his grandson, who never knew him. But his character had been spoiled, partly by almost continual ill-health and partly by his ‘having been placed at too early a period of his life in the possession of what then appeared to him inexhaustible wealth’. Georgiana’s father was only eleven when his own father died of alcoholism, leaving behind an estate worth £750,000 – roughly equivalent to £45 million today.* It was one of the largest fortunes in England and included 100,000 acres in twenty-seven different counties, five substantial residences, and a sumptuous collection of plate, jewels and old master paintings. Lord Spencer had an income of £700 a week in an era when a gentleman could live off £300 a year.
Georgiana’s earliest memories were of travelling between the five houses. She learnt to associate the change in seasons with her family’s move to a different location. During the ‘season’, when society took up residence ‘in town’ and parliament was in session, they lived in a draughty, old-fashioned house in Grosvenor Street. In the summer, when the stench of the cesspool next to the house and the clouds of dust generated by passing traffic became unbearable, they took refuge at Wimbledon Park, a Palladian villa on the outskirts of London. In the autumn they went north to their hunting lodge in Pytchley outside Kettering, and in the winter months, from November to March, they stayed at Althorp, the country seat of the Spencers for over 300 years.
When the diarist John Evelyn visited Althorp in the seventeenth century he described the H-shaped building as almost palatial, ‘a noble pile … such as may become a great prince’.5 He particularly admired the great saloon, which had been the courtyard of the house until one of Georgiana’s ancestors covered it over with a glass roof. To Lord and Lady Spencer it was the ballroom; to the children it was an indoor playground. On rainy days they would take turns to slide down the famous ten-foot-wide staircase or run around the first-floor gallery playing tag. From the top of the stairs, dominating the hall, a full-length portrait of Robert, first Baron Spencer (created 1603), gazed down at his descendants whose lesser portraits lined the ground floor.*
Georgiana was seven when the family moved their London residence to the newly built Spencer House in St James’s, overlooking Green Park. The length of time and sums involved in the building – almost £50,000 over seven years – reflected Lord Spencer’s determination to create a house worthy of his growing collection of classical antiquities. The travel writer and economist Arthur Young was among the first people to view the house when Lord Spencer opened it to the public. ‘I know not in England a more beautiful piece of architecture,’ he wrote, ‘superior to any house I have seen … The hangings, carpets, glasses, sofas, chairs, tables, slabs, everything, are not only astonishingly beautiful, but contain a vast variety.’6 Everything, from the elaborate classical façade to the lavishly decorated interior, so much admired by Arthur Young, reflected Lord Spencer’s taste. He was a noted connoisseur and passionate collector of rare books and Italian art. Each time he went abroad he returned with a cargo of paintings and statues for the house. His favourite room, the Painted Room, as it has always been called, was the first complete neo-classical interior in Europe.
The Spencers entertained constantly and were generous patrons. Spencer House was often used for plays and concerts and Georgiana grew up in an extraordinarily sophisticated milieu of writers, politicians and artists. After dinner the guests would sometimes be entertained by a soliloquy delivered by the actor David Garrick or a reading by the writer Laurence Sterne, who dedicated a section of Tristram Shandy to the Spencers. The house had been built not to attract artists, however, but to consolidate the political prestige and influence of the family. The urban palaces of the nobility encircled Westminster like satellite courts. They were deliberately designed to combine informal politics with a formal social life. A ball might fill the vast public rooms one night, a secret political meeting the next. Many a career began with a witty remark made in a drawing room; many a government policy emerged out of discussions over dinner. Jobs were discreetly sought, positions gained, and promises of support obtained in return. This was the age of the Whig oligarchy, when a handful of great landowning families sat in the cabinet, and owned or had a controlling interest in more than half the country’s electoral boroughs. Land conferred wealth, wealth conferred power, and power, in eighteenth-century terms, meant access to patronage, from lucrative government sinecures down to the local parish office worth £20 per annum.
Ironically, there was one condition attached to Lord Spencer’s inheritance: although he could sit in parliament he could not embark on a political career.* He retained great influence because he could use his wealth to support the government, but his political ambitions were thwarted. As a result he had no challenges to draw him out, and little experience of applying himself. He led a life dedicated to pleasure and, in time, the surfeit of ease took its toll. Lord Spencer became diffident and withdrawn. The indefatigable diarist Lady Mary Coke, a distant relation, once heard him speak in parliament and thought ‘as much as could be heard was very pretty, but he was extremely frightened and spoke very low’.7 The Duke of Newcastle awarded him an earldom in 1765 in recognition of his consistent loyalty. But Lord Spencer’s elevation to the peerage failed to prevent him from becoming more self-absorbed with each passing year. His friend Viscount Palmerston reflected sadly: ‘He seems to be a man whose value few people know. The bright side of his character appears in private and the dark side in public … it is only those who live in intimacy with him who know that he has an understanding and a heart that might do credit to any man.’8
Lady Spencer knew her husband could be generous and sensitive. Margaret Georgiana Poyntz, known as Georgiana, met John Spencer in 1754 when she was seventeen, and immediately fell in love with him. ‘I will own it,’ she confided to a friend, ‘and never deny it that I do love Spencer above all men upon Earth.’9 He was a handsome man then, with deep-set eyes and thin lips which curled in a cupid’s bow. His daughter inherited from him her unusual height and russet-coloured hair. When Lady Spencer first knew him he loved to parade in the flamboyant fashions of the French aristocracy. At one masquerade he made a striking figure in a blue and gold suit with white leather shoes topped with blue and gold roses.10
Georgiana’s mother had delicate cheekbones, auburn hair and deep brown eyes which looked almost black against her pale complexion. The fashion for arranging the hair away from the face suited her perfectly. It helped to disguise the fact that her eyes bulged slightly, a feature which she passed on to Georgiana. She was intelligent, exceptionally well read and, unusually for women of her day, she could read and write Greek as well as French and Italian. A portrait painted by Pompeo Batoni in 1764 shows her surrounded by her interests: in one hand she holds a sheaf of music – she was a keen amateur composer – near the other lies a guitar; there are books on the table and in the background the ruins of ancient Rome, referring to her love of all things classical. ‘She has so decided a character,’ remarked Lord Bristol, ‘that nothing can warp it.’11
Her father, Stephen Poyntz, had died when she was thirteen, leaving the family in comfortable but not rich circumstances. He had risen from humble origins – his father was an upholsterer – by making the best of an engaging manner and a brilliant mind. He began his career as a tutor to the children of Viscount Townshend and ended it a Privy Councillor to King George II. Accordingly, he brought up his children to be little courtiers like himself: charming, discreet and socially adept in all situations. Vice was tolerated so long as it was hidden. ‘I have known the Poyntzes in the nursery,’ Lord Lansdowne remarked contemptuously, ‘the Bible on the table, the cards in the drawer.’
‘Never was such a lover,’ remarked the prolific diarist and chronicler of her times Mrs Delany, who watched young John Spencer ardently court Miss Poyntz during the spring and summer of 1754. The following year, in late spring, the two families, the Poyntzes and the Spencers, made a week-long excursion to Wimbledon Park. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind about the outcome and yet Spencer was in an agony of anticipation throughout the visit. At the last moment, with the carriages waiting to leave, he drew her aside and blushingly produced a diamond and ruby ring. Inside the gold band, in tiny letters, were the words: ‘MON COEUR EST TOUT À TOI. GARDE LE BI EN POUR MOI.’*
The first years of their married life were happy. The Duke of Queensberry, known as ‘Old Q’, declared that the Spencers were ‘really the happiest people I ever saw in the marriage system’. They delighted in each other’s company and were affectionate in public as well as in private. In middle age, Lady Spencer proudly told David Garrick, ‘I verily believe that we have neither of us for one instant repented our lot from that time to this.’12 They had ‘modern’ attitudes both in their taste and in their attitude to social mores. Their daughter Harriet recorded an occasion when Lord Spencer took her to see some mummified corpses in a church crypt because ‘it is foolish and superstitious to be afraid of seeing dead bodies’.13 Another time he ‘bid us observe how much persecution encreased [the] zeal for the religion [of the sect] so oppressed, which he said was a lesson against oppression, and for toleration’.14
The Spencers were demonstrative and affectionate parents. ‘I think I have experienced a thousand times,’ Lady Spencer mused, ‘that commendation does much more good than reproof.’15 She preferred to obtain obedience through indirect methods of persuasion, as this letter to eleven-year-old Georgiana shows: ‘I would have neither of you go to the Ball on Tuesday, tho’ I think I need not have mentioned this, as I flatter myself you would both chose rather to go with me, than when I am not there …’16 It was a sentiment typical of an age influenced by the ideas of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose books had helped to popularize the cult of ‘sensibility’. In some cases the new, softer attitudes ran to ridiculous excesses. James Boswell, who was himself a tolerant father, complained that his dinner party was ruined when the Countess of Rothes insisted on bringing her two small children, who ‘played and prattled and suffered nobody to be heard but themselves’.17
Georgiana’s education reflected her parents’ idea of a sound upbringing. During the week a succession of experts trooped up and down the grand staircase to the bare schoolroom overlooking the courtyard. There, for most of the day, Georgiana studied a range of subjects, both feminine (deportment and harp-playing) and practical (geography and languages). The aim was to make her polished but not overly educated. The royal drawing-master and miniaturist John Gresse taught her drawing. The composer Thomas Linley, later father-in-law to the playwright Richard Sheridan, gave her singing lessons. The distinguished orientalist Sir William Jones, who was preparing her brother George for Harrow, taught her writing. She also learned French, Latin, Italian, dancing and horsemanship.18 Everything came easily to her, but what delighted Georgiana’s mother in particular was her quick grasp of etiquette. Lady Spencer’s own upbringing as a courtier’s daughter made her keenly critical of Georgiana’s comportment in public; it was almost the only basis, apart from religion, on which she judged her, praised her and directed her training.
Lady Spencer’s emphasis on acquiring social skills encouraged the performer in Georgiana. In quiet moments she would curl up in a window seat in the nursery and compose little poems and stories to be recited after dinner. She loved to put on an ‘evening’ and entertain her family with dramatic playlets featuring heroines in need of rescue. While Georgiana bathed in the limelight, George concentrated on being the dependable, sensible child who could be relied upon to remember instructions. Harriet, despite being the youngest, enjoyed the least attention of all. Perhaps in another family her obvious sensitivity and intelligence would have marked her out as a special child. But with a precocious and amusing sister and model brother, the shy Harriet shruggled to attract her parents’ notice. She attached herself to Georgiana, content to worship her and perform the duties of a faithful lieutenant. Even here poor Harriet often had to compete with George. He was proud of Georgiana’s talent and at Harrow would show round the verse letters he had received from her. ‘By this time there is not an old Dowager in or about Richmond that has not a copy of them; there’s honour for you!’ he informed her. On one occasion he imagined the two of them achieving fame by publishing her letters under the title, ‘An epistle from a young lady of quality abroad to her Brother at School in England’.19
Georgiana could think of nothing more delightful than a public exhibition of her writing. Despite being the clear favourite of the family she was anxious and attention-seeking, constantly concerned about disappointing her parents. ‘Although I can’t write as well as my brother,’ she told them plaintively when she was seven, ‘I love you very much and him just as much.’20 Adults never failed to be charmed by Georgiana’s lively and perceptive conversation and yet she valued their praise only if it made an impression on her mother and father. Her ability to attract notice pleased Lady Spencer as much as its origins puzzled her: ‘Without being handsome or having a single good feature in her face,’ she remarked to a friend, ‘[she is] one of the most showy girls I ever saw.’21 Lady Spencer never understood her daughter’s need for attention or its effect on her development. In later years, when forced to examine her part in Georgiana’s misfortunes, she blamed herself for having been too lenient a parent.
In 1763, when Georgiana was six, the stability she had enjoyed came to an abrupt end when the Spencers embarked on a grand tour. Lord Spencer had trouble with his lungs and his invalid condition made him bad tempered. Lady Spencer, worn down by his moods, urged him to rest and heal in the warmer climate of the Continent. Most of their friends were going abroad. Britain had been at war with France for the previous seven years and, although the fighting had largely taken place in outposts – in Canada, India and the Caribbean – visits across the Channel were severely curtailed. With the advent of peace, travel became possible again and the English aristocracy could indulge in its favourite pastime: visiting ‘the sights’.
Georgiana accompanied her parents while George and Harriet, both considered too young to undertake such a long journey, stayed behind. The Spencers’ first stop was Spa, in what is now Belgium, in the Ardennes forest. Its natural warm springs and pastoral scenery made it a fashionable watering place among the European nobility, who came to drink the waters and bathe in the artificially constructed pools. But Lady Spencer’s hopes that its gentle atmosphere would soothe her husband’s nerves were disappointed. A friend who stayed with them for a short while described the visit as one of the worst he had ever made: ‘If you ask me really whether I had a great deal of pleasure in it I must be forced to answer in the negative. Lord S’s unhappy disposition to look always on the worst side of things, and if he does not find a subject for fretting to make one, rendered both himself and his company insensible to much of the satisfaction which the circumstances of our journey might have occasioned us.’22
2 Fashion’s Favourite 1774–1776
The heads of Society at present are the Duchess of Devonshire, Duchess of Marlborough, Duchess of Bedford, Lady Harrington, and Co. etc.
Morning Post, Saturday 29 July 1775
The excess to which pleasure and dissipation are now carried amongst the ton exceeds all bounds, particularly among women of quality. The duchess of D—e has almost ruined her constitution by the hurrying life which she has led for some time; her mother, Lady S—r has mentioned it with concern to the Duke, who only answers, ‘Let her alone – she is but a girl.’
Morning Post, Monday 11 March 1776
THREE DAYS after the wedding the Duke was spotted with his drinking companions trawling the pleasure gardens of Ranelagh at Chelsea. He provoked more gossip when he turned up four hours late for his presentation at court with Georgiana. All newly married couples were required to present themselves to the Queen at one of her twice-weekly public audiences at St James’s Palace, known as ‘Drawing Rooms’. ‘The Drawing-room was fuller than ever I saw it,’ a witness recorded, ‘excepting that of a Birthday [of the King or Queen], owing, as I suppose, to the curiosity to see the Duchess of Devonshire.’ Georgiana was wearing her wedding dress and ‘look’d very pretty … happiness was never more marked in a countenance than hers. She was properly fine for the time of year, and her diamonds are very magnificent.’1 The formidable Lady Mary Coke wondered why the Duke ambled in on his own several hours after Georgiana. He ‘had very near been too late; it was nearly four o’clock when he came into the Drawing-Room’. She watched him for some time and noticed that he showed no emotion. ‘His Grace is as happy as his Duchess,’ she decided charitably, ‘but his countenance does not mark it so strongly.’2 Lady Mary’s opinion might have been different had she known about Lady Spencer’s frantic messages to the Duke, imploring him not to be late.
Protocol demanded that Georgiana should pay a call on every notable person in society. For the next three weeks she went from house to house, making polite conversation for fifteen minutes while her hosts scrutinized the new Duchess of Devonshire. In an era when social prestige was itself a form of currency, Georgiana’s visits were highly prized. Lady Mary Coke was not among the 500 whom Georgiana managed to see, which soured her feelings towards her cousin for ever after.
In early July Georgiana set off with the Duke on the three-day journey from London to Derbyshire, to stay at Chatsworth for the summer. The long hours on the road, with no amusement save the view from the window, were the first she had spent alone with her husband. He had hardly addressed a word to her since the day of their marriage. His taciturnity made her nervous and she overcompensated by being excessively lively. There were plenty of scenes for her to point out: a picturesque church here, a field of poppies there – rural villages in England were much more prosperous and better kept than in Europe. A Frenchman on a tour of Britain in 1765 was amazed to see that labourers had shoes on their feet, and instead of grey rags wore ‘good cloth’ on their backs. In contrast to the mud cottages of the peasantry in France, all the dwellings he saw were ‘built of brick and covered with tiles, [and] have glass windows’.3
The road had dwindled to little more than a bumpy track by the time the cavalcade of wagons and baggage carts reached Derbyshire. Here rocky moorland and fast-flowing waterfalls replaced the green hedgerows and rich hay fields of the south. Daniel Defoe toured England at the beginning of the century and described the countryside around Chatsworth as a ‘waste and howling wilderness with neither hedge nor tree’. But Horace Walpole, visiting the area half a century later, when tastes inclined towards the romantic, was spellbound by its ruggedness. ‘Vast woods hand down the hills,’ he wrote, ‘and the immense rocks only serve to dignify the prospect.’ He admired the terrain; but Chatsworth itself – the ‘Palace of the Peak’ – with its gloomy grandeur and isolated situation, lowered his spirits.
Successive generations of Cavendishes had transformed the original Elizabethan design until it was unrecognizable. In 1686 the first Duke of Devonshire, who was of ‘nice honour in everything, but the paying of his tradesmen’, ordered the architect William Talman to tear down Chatsworth’s pointed turrets and design something more modern in their place. He continued adding to the house until the result was a novel evocation of the English baroque style. Georgiana’s first glimpse was of a rectangular stone box, some 172 feet long and three storeys high, topped by a cornice and balustrade which bore elaborately decorated urns at regular intervals. The façade was a bold design of double-height windows alternating with fluted pilasters, with the Cavendish symbol of interlocking serpents carved along the length of the cornice. As a whole the house and parkland was far more imposing than Althorp, except for one note of light relief in the garden – a tree made of lead. Unsuspecting visitors who stood beneath it were drenched by water spurting from its leaves. Not everyone appreciated the joke: the traveller and diarist Joseph Torrington thought it ‘worthy only of a tea garden in London’.
Torrington also criticized the grounds as lacking in taste, even though they were the work of Capability Brown, and the house as ‘vile and uncomfortable’.4 He disliked the heavy use of gilt on every available surface; the combination of unpainted wainscoting and inlaid wood floors made the rooms appear dark even in the middle of the day. By the 1770s Chatsworth had an old-fashioned feel; its layout, which followed the seventeenth-century practice of linking public and private rooms along a single axis, was inconvenient and impractical; newer houses had their family apartments entirely separate from their entertaining rooms.5 But Chatsworth was meant to be more than a family home. Its sumptuous rooms, with their classical wall paintings and triumphant gods staring down from the ceilings, performed a public function. Their purpose was to inspire awe among the lower orders who trooped round on Public Days, and respect – as well as envy – among the aristocracy. Comfort was a secondary consideration. The dining room could easily accommodate over a hundred but – as Georgiana discovered – there were only three water closets in the entire house.
She was not alone with the Duke for long. The Spencers came to stay for an extended visit, bringing with them her sister Harriet and an assortment of pets, favourite horses and servants. They came in part to provide Georgiana with the support and guidance she desperately needed. The Duke’s brothers and uncles were already there to check on her behaviour as the new Duchess and chatelaine of Chatsworth. Georgiana was on show from the moment she stepped out of her carriage. Aristocratic life in the eighteenth century had little in the way of privacy: almost every activity took place before an audience of servants. Rank determined behaviour, and the social pressure on Georgiana to remain ‘within character’ was intense. She was now the wife of one of the most powerful men in the country. Everyone – from the staff assembled outside Chatsworth to welcome her on her arrival, to the neighbours who came to pay their respects, to the people who met her at public functions, saw her from afar, or read about her in the papers – expected her to know precisely what to say and how to perform.
What help the Cavendishes were prepared to give Georgiana lay waiting in her bed chamber. The Duke’s agent, Heaton, had prepared a list of the household expenses, which included the names of the parishioners and tenants who received charity from the estate and whose welfare was now in her trust. Some received food, others alms; when the Duke was in residence the poorer tenants were given bread on Mondays and Thursdays. His arrival, and likewise his departure, was always marked by a gift of ox meat to the local parishioners. Georgiana’s first task was to fulfil her social obligations and, with the importance of the Cavendish name in mind, to establish goodwill between herself and the Duke’s many dependants.
These duties gave a rhythm to Georgiana’s first days and weeks at Chatsworth. In the morning the men went out riding or shooting, while she made exploratory visits to the neighbourhood accompanied by Lady Spencer, who was pregnant again. She quickly made friends with all the Duke’s tenants, displaying the charm and sympathy for which she would become renowned. On one of their walks they found a disused building which Georgiana decided should be used for her first charity school. This was the sort of thing she enjoyed; as a little girl she had given her pocket money to street children and, according to her grandmother, ‘seemed as glad to give [the coins] as they were to have them’.6
They would return at mid-day, rest, and prepare for dinner at three. It was the most important meal of the day and could last up to four hours. Instead of one course following another, there were two ‘covers’, or servings, of fifteen or so sweet and savoury dishes, artfully arranged in geometric patterns and decorated with flowers. Georgiana self-consciously practised being the hostess in front of her parents and the Duke, giving orders to footmen and displaying a command which she did not necessarily feel. Eighteenth-century dinners were less formal than those in the century to follow, but their rules, though subtle, were strictly observed.* Although diners could sit where they chose, the host and hostess always sat at the head and foot of the table with the principal guests on either side. It was considered ill-bred to ask for a dish or to reach too far across for one – the servants standing along the walls were supposed to ensure that the guests’ plates were never empty. Not only did Georgiana have to keep up a lively flow of conversation, she also had to watch the servants for neglect, the guests for boredom, and the Cavendishes for signs of displeasure.
In the evening she played cards with some of the guests or listened to music performed by Felix Giardini, the violinist and director of the London Opera and a friend of the Spencers. At her request he composed pieces for small orchestra which Georgiana and some of her musical guests would perform under his direction. The house was filling up as more of the Duke’s friends and relatives came to inspect his bride. Georgiana did her best to appear composed and friendly towards the sophisticated strangers who often arrived at short notice and expected to be entertained. That she succeeded in fulfilling her role was thanks to the presence of Lady Spencer by her side as much as to her careful upbringing. Georgiana had little acquaintance with her husband or with his world; training was all that she could rely upon to take her through the first few months.
By late September autumn colours were returning to the park and the sun was casting longer shadows. It was easy to stay outside for too long after dinner and catch a chill, as Lady Spencer did one afternoon. She seemed to have only a slight fever; but a few days later she suffered a miscarriage. When she recovered her only desire was to return to Althorp; she had lost two children, and Georgiana’s steps towards independence may have caused her to feel she was losing another. Georgiana came downstairs one morning to discover that her parents had left without saying goodbye. In a hastily scribbled note Lady Spencer apologized for running away, and blamed it on ‘my Spirits having been lower’d by my late illness … Do not think I shall ever be so nonsensical about quitting you again,’ she promised, ‘but the number of people that are here are so formidable and I felt so afraid of disgracing myself and distressing you, that I think it better to get out of the way.’7 Georgiana was distraught and full of guilt: ‘Oh my dearest Mama,’ she wrote immediately, ‘how can I tell [you], how can I express how much I love you and how much I felt at your going.’8
Lady Spencer was relieved to receive Georgiana’s letter; its tone reassured her that independence was still some way off. She replied with a description of the trust and obedience she expected of Georgiana in their future relationship:
Here commences our correspondence, my dear Georgiana, from which I propose myself more real pleasure than I can express, but the greatest part of it will quite vanish if I do not find you treat me with that entire Confidence that my heart expects. Seventeen years of painful anxiety and unwearied attention on my part, and the most affectionate and grateful return on yours is surely a sufficient [reason] to give me the very first place. I will not say your heart because that the D of D will have, but in your friendship.9
Georgiana was happy to comply as her days were lonely now. ‘As soon as I am up and have breakfasted I ride,’ she wrote. ‘I then come in and write and or do anything of employment, I then walk, dress for Dinner and after Dinner I take a short walk if it is fine and I have time ‘till the Gentlemen come out, and then spend the remainder of the evening in Playing at Whist, or writing if I have an opportunity and reading.’10 Not caring for his wife’s after-dinner concerts, the Duke usually took his friends off to drink and play billiards. Georgiana would not see him until much later, when, already in bed and fast asleep, she would be woken up by a noise at the door – he was impatient for her to become pregnant. She often rose full of dread at what lay ahead in the day. Sometimes she stayed in bed as long as possible, but this evasive measure brought its own problems.
Lord Charles and Lady D. Thompson and Miss Hatham arrived and I was obliged (for they were let in before I knew anything about it) to pretend that I was gone walking and at last went down Drest the greatest figure you can Imagine [she wrote sadly to her mother]. To compleat my Distress another Coachful arrived – of People I had never seen before. As I could not have much to say for myself, and some of the Company were talking about things I knew nothing of, I made the silliest figure you can conceive, and J [Lord John Cavendish] says I broke all the rules of Hospitality in forgetting to offer them some breakfast.11
She also had to preside over the Public Days which had resumed after Lady Spencer’s departure. Chatsworth still maintained the tradition of holding a Public Day every week. On these occasions the house was open to all the Duke’s tenants, as well as to any respectable stranger who wished to see the house and have dinner with its owners. Georgiana and the Duke stood in the hall wearing their finest clothes, as if attending a state occasion, and personally greeted each visitor. They had to remain gracious and sober while their guests helped themselves to the free food and drink. ‘Some of the men got extremely drunk,’ Georgiana recorded after one dinner, and her friends, ‘if they had not made a sudden retreat, would have been the victims of a drunken clergyman, who very nearly fell on them.’12 Her first appearance naturally caused great excitement in Derbyshire, but after a few weeks the Public Days became less crowded. She learned how to orchestrate a room full of strangers, how to pick out those whom she ought particularly to distinguish, and how to detach herself from those who would otherwise cling to her arm all day.*
Public Days were a feudal relic from the era of vassals and private armies. Because of the expense only the grandest of families continued the tradition. Such lavish entertainment was now a means of cultivating good relations with the tenantry and of safeguarding local political influence. In the eighteenth century the maintenance of an electoral borough was a family matter; it was part of the estate, as tangible and valuable as land. The Cavendish influence in parliament depended on the number of MPs who sat in the family’s ‘interest’. At its height, thirteen MPs owed allegiance to the Duke, the second largest grouping within the Whig party after the Marquess of Rockingham, who had eighteen.13 Since the Duke’s brother-in-law the Duke of Portland controlled ten, when the Cavendishes collaborated they presented a formidable faction.
That year the Public Days had a particular purpose; a general election was scheduled in October and the Cavendishes were defending their electoral interests in Derbyshire. Since peers were barred from personally campaigning in parliamentary elections, their wives and relatives had to look after their interests for them. On 8 October Georgiana went to her first election ball in Derby, dressed in fashionable London clothes for the benefit of the locals. The Duke’s brothers were already drunk by the time she arrived and Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Duke’s uncle, almost fell on her as she climbed the stairs to the assembly room. An open-door policy operated, and the heat and sweat of so many bodies crammed together made the room suffocating. The musicians – the usual country players – made an appalling noise, each following a different measure.14 Nevertheless Georgiana kept her poise and danced to the tunes from memory, smiling graciously at her partners and at any townspeople who caught her eye. The next ball she attended revealed the Derbyshire voters’ opinion of the new Duchess: ‘we were received there by a great huzza,’ she recorded. ‘The room was very much crowded but they were so good as to split in 2 to make room for us.’15 Although the Whigs did not do well as a party in the election, the Duke’s candidates were voted in without any trouble. His bill came to £554, which was low compared to the average £5,000 spent on a contested election.16
The Spencers had to pay considerably more. Lady Spencer went to the borough of Northampton Town because Lord Spencer’s nominee Mr Tollemache was facing a challenge from a newcomer, Sir James Langham. ‘I have dined each day during the Poll at the George with all the gentlemen and am extremely popular among them,’ she wrote contentedly to Georgiana.17 She not only courted the gentlemen voters but bravely went out to rally the whole town:
I set out on Thursday morning with Mrs Tollemache in my Cabriolet and four, in hopes of putting a little spirit into our people who were sadly discompos’d at having neither money or drink offer’d them [she informed her daughter on 9 October 1774]. I succeeded beyond my expectations, for I no sooner got to the George than a little mob surrounded us and insisted on taking off our horses and drawing us around the town … in a very few minutes we had a mob of several hundred people screaming Spencer for ever – Tollemache and Robinson – No Langham. In this manner did they drag us about thro’ every street in the town, and were so delighted with my talking to them and shewing no signs of fear at going wherever they chose, that it was with the utmost difficulty I could in the evening … prevent their drawing me quite home to Althorp. I went thro’ the same ceremony again on Friday, when very luckily my chaise was broke … it has ensur’d Mr Tollemache a great majority, by putting such numbers of people in spirits and good humour who before were cross and sulky and would not vote because there was nothing to enliven them.18
Despite the fact that people responded favourably to her youth and enthusiasm, Georgiana was constantly terrified of forgetting herself and committing some faux pas. This worry was exacerbated by the Cavendishes, who sternly demanded that she conform to their ways. A century of political leadership and proud public service had made them self-conscious and introverted in their dealings with the outside world. The Cavendish way of doing things stamped itself on all members of the family, from the relentless self-control they exerted on their emotions to the peculiar drawl which marred their speech – they pronounced her name ‘George-ayna’. In her eagerness to be accepted Georgiana adopted all their mannerisms, even vigorously applying the Cavendish drawl.
By now, three months into her marriage, Georgiana could not help but suspect the true nature of the Duke’s feelings towards her. He was kind in a distant sort of way, but he was naturally reticent and she soon realized that they had little in common. Her innocence bored him and Georgiana was too acute not to notice his lack of interest in her. She told her mother that she was secretly making an effort to be more attractive to him. Since he was so much more worldly than her, she read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son; and knowing of his interest in history and the classics she began several books on ancient Greece and on the reign of Louis XIV, ‘for as those two periods are so distant there will be no danger of their interfering so as to puzzle me’.19
At first Lady Spencer tried to reassure her that the Duke ‘was no less happy than herself’.20 She also supplied her daughter with advice on how to please him, suggesting that she should curb any thoughts of independence and show her submission by anticipating his desires:
But where a husband’s delicacy and indulgence is so great that he will not say what he likes, the task becomes more difficult, and a wife must use all possible delicacy and ingenuity in trying to find out his inclinations, and the utmost readiness in conforming to them. You have this difficult task to perform, my dearest Georgiana, for the Duke of D., from a mistaken tenderness, persists in not dictating to you the things he wishes you to do, and not contradicting you in anything however disagreeable to him. This should engage you by a thousand additional motives of duty and gratitude to try to know his sentiments upon even the most trifling subjects, and especially not to enter into any engagements or form any plans without consulting him …21
Unwilling to disappoint her mother, Georgiana made sincere efforts to appear cheerful, sending her carefully composed accounts of her life. Lady Spencer was particularly delighted when Georgiana wrote her letters in French and interspersed her news with little poems or religious reflections. Since she had been told that she ought to be content, Georgiana asserted that she was: ‘I have been so happy in marrying a Man I so sincerely lov’d, and experience Dayly so much of his goodness to me, that it is impossible I should not feel to the greatest degree that mutual happyness you speak of.’ But she could not help adding anxiously, ‘My only wish is to deserve it and my greatest pleasure the thought of being in any manner able to add to His Happyness.’22 She was quite sure that she did not add to his happiness in the slightest degree.
Georgiana had entered into marriage thinking that, like her mother, she would be a wife and companion. She soon discovered that her chief role was to produce children and carry out her social obligations. The Duke was used to his bachelor life: love he received from his mistress, companionship from his friends; from his wife he expected loyalty, support and commitment to the family’s interests. His was an old-fashioned view, greatly out of step with an age which celebrated romantic sentiment and openly shed tears over Clarissa. The Duke did not know how to be romantic; never having experienced tenderness himself he was incapable of showing it to Georgiana. He did not mean to hurt her, but there was a nine-year age difference between them and a gulf of misunderstanding and misplaced expectations.
They left Chatsworth in January, much to Georgiana’s relief. In London she would be surrounded by her own family and friends and no longer reliant on the monosyllabic Duke or his critical relations. The caravan of carriages and coaches, piled high with boxes of plate and linens, set off once more. Most of the servants joined the back of the train to take up their duties at Devonshire House, leaving behind a skeleton staff until the family’s return in the summer.
Devonshire House lay in London’s western end, known as the ‘polite’ end, encompassing Piccadilly, St James’s and Hyde Park. Before the eighteenth century the grand nobility lived in private palaces along the Strand, overlooking the river Thames, but after the Glorious Revolution the nature of political life changed. Parliament no longer met at the King’s command but according to a set calendar, while the court resided permanently at St James’s Palace when parliament was in session. The aristocracy had to be in London for much longer periods of time, and in a location convenient for both Westminster and St James’s. The concentration of so much wealth and power transformed the city. By the mid-eighteenth century one in ten Englishmen had lived in London at some point in his life. There was a frenzy of building as the capital spread out westwards. Speculators widened country lanes into streets, turned fields into smart squares, and built shops, arcades and churches on previously empty spaces. By the 1770s modern London was envied throughout Europe for its glass-fronted shops and spacious roads that easily accommodated two lanes of traffic.
The aristocratic ‘season’ came into existence not only to further the marriage market but to entertain the upper classes while they carried out their political duties. The season followed the rhythm of parliament: it began in late October with the opening of the new session, and ended in June with the summer recess. The two most popular nights of the week were Wednesday and Saturday, when parliament was not in session and the men’s attendance could be assured. A completely new form of public architecture appeared, the sole purpose of which was to facilitate social intercourse. Coffee houses – where men of all classes gathered during the day to read newspapers and discuss politics – sprang up. White’s, the first of the London clubs, opened in St James’s in 1697; Almack’s, Boodles and Brooks’s followed half a century later. For evening entertainment people went to Covent Garden or to the Italian Opera House in the Haymarket to hear Handel, or to Drury Lane to watch David Garrick. Afterwards they could pay 2s 6d to enter Ranelagh, or visit the riverside gardens at Vauxhall to dance at a masquerade, attend a concert, or watch the fireworks.
Baron Archenholtz came to London at this time and was amazed by the difference between the east and the west, the old and the new. East was the City, home of the country’s banking, insurance and commercial institutions. It retained a medieval feel with its tiny slipways and hidden courtyards. Further east were the manufacturing districts, where artisans laboured in run-down workshops without heat or ventilation to produce luxury goods to be sold in the West End – jewellery, clocks, saddles, furniture and cutlery. Further east still were the Spitalfields silk-weavers, the soap-making factories, tanneries and the slum-dwellings of the marginal poor. ‘The East end,’ Archenholtz wrote, ‘especially along the shores of the Thames, consists of old houses, the streets there are narrow, dark and ill-paved; inhabited by sailors and other workmen who are employed in the construction of ships and by a great part of the Jews.
‘The contrast between this and the West end,’ Archenholtz continued, ‘is astonishing: the houses here are mostly new and elegant; the squares superb, the streets straight and open … If all London were as well built, there would be nothing to compare it with.’23 Another visitor commented on how ‘pure air circulates in the new streets [compared to the fetid stench in the alleyways behind Westminster]; and the squares are carefully planned, and pleasing to the eye; the upper-class society who live there find these squares salubrious since within each of them is a magnificent garden; the surrounding houses are tall with plenty of big windows … admirable pavements very wide protect the passers-by from carriages and carts.’24 New lighting systems were being introduced and stucco was being applied to the front of buildings: they ‘lifted’ the city from under the thick fog of coal dust ‘which envelops London like a mantle; a cloud which the sun pervades rarely’.
Situated opposite what is now the Ritz Hotel, Devonshire House commanded magnificent views over Green Park. The original house had burnt down in 1733 and the third Duke of Devonshire commissioned William Kent to rebuild it. Aesthetically it was a failure. The house was stark and devoid of architectural detail; the bottom windows were too large, the top windows too small. The whole building was enclosed behind a brick wall which hid the ground floor from view and made the street unattractive to passers-by. The London topographer, James Ralph, wrote, ‘It is spacious, and so are the East India Company’s warehouses; and both are equally deserving of praise.’25 As well as attracting every graffiti writer within two miles, the brick wall ruined the architectural line of Piccadilly. One contemporary complained: ‘The Duke of Devonshire’s is one of those which present a horrid blank of wall, cheerless and unsociable by day, and terrible by night. Would it be credible that any man of taste, fashion, and figure would prefer the solitary grandeur of enclosing himself in a jail, to the enjoyment of the first view in Britain, which he might possess by throwing down this execrable brick screen?’26
The chief attraction of Devonshire House was the public rooms, which were larger and more ornate than almost anything to be seen in London. A crowd of 1,200 could easily sweep through the house during a ball, a remarkable contrast to some great houses where the crush could lift a person off his feet and carry him from room to room. Guests entered the house by an outer staircase which took them directly to the first floor. Inside was a hall two storeys high – flanked on either side by two drawing rooms of identical size. Beyond the hall was another, even larger drawing room, several anterooms and the dining room. Some of the finest paintings in England adorned the walls, including Rembrandt’s Old Man in Turkish Dress, and Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego.
3 The Vortex of Dissipation 1776–1778
Gaming among the females at Chatsworth has been carried to such a pitch that the phlegmatic Duke has been provoked to express at it and he has spoken to the Duchess in the severest terms against a conduct which has driven many from the house who could not afford to partake of amusements carried on at the expense of £500 or £1000 a night.
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Wednesday 4 September 1776
As you are the loveliest and best tempered woman in his Majesty’s dominions, learn to be the most prudent and wise. If you do, your dominion will be universal, and you will have nothing to lament, but that you have no more worlds to conquer.
Editorial addressed to Georgiana, Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 4 July 1777
‘COMING HERE has made a strong impression on me,’ Georgiana wrote during a visit to the Devonshires’ Londesborough estate in October 1776. ‘Alas,’ she continued, ‘I can’t help but make an unhappy comparison between the emotions I experienced two years ago during my first visit, and what I feel now.’1 She was suffering from a profound sense of disillusionment, not only with her marriage but also with fashionable life.
For those who could moderate their pursuit of pleasure, Whig society was sophisticated, tolerant and cosmopolitan. Whigs prided themselves on their patronage of the arts as much as they venerated their contribution to statecraft. They were the oligarchs of taste, proselytizers of their superior cultivation. But the ton, by definition, inhabited the realm of the extreme. Moderation was not a part of its world: elegance bowed to artifice, pleasure gave way to excess. ‘You must expect to be class’d with the company you keep,’ was Lady Spencer’s constant warning to Georgiana.2 Embarrassed by her own previous association with the ton, Lady Spencer nursed a visceral dislike towards its members. She regarded it as a magnet for the least respectable elements of her class, and Georgiana’s friends as the worst among the bad.
The people who gathered around Georgiana and the Duke shared an attachment to the Whig party, a worldly attitude, a passion for the theatre and a love of scandal. Fashion was the only ‘career’ open to aristocratic women; politics the only ‘trade’ that a man of rank might pursue. Georgiana’s friends engaged in both regardless of their sex. Women aspired to be political hostesses of note, men to be arbiters of taste. Their collective ambition and competitiveness made them distinct even within the ton, and it was not long before society labelled the habitués of Devonshire House the ‘Devonshire House Circle’. All Whigs were welcome, of course, but the older, staider members felt ill at ease among the more rakish elements. Edmund Burke, then approaching the height of his influence within the party as its philosopher and propagandist, almost never went except to accompany his patron, the Marquess of Rockingham. Devonshire House was too frivolous and louche for him, and its casual attitude towards sexual misconduct made the middle-class Irishman uncomfortable. Some of the men took a delight in being overtly crude, as the following wager illustrates: ‘Ld Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Ld Derby, to receive 500 Gs. whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a Balloon one thousand yards from Earth.’3
Those who embraced the Circle maintained a lofty disdain for the world outside.* Serious Devonshire House acolytes identified themselves by their imitation of the Cavendish drawl. By now Georgiana never spoke in any other way and the more it became one of her personal mannerisms, the more compelling it was to her admirers. What began as playful mimicry evolved with popular usage into a kind of dialect, called the ‘Devonshire House Drawl’. It has been characterized as part baby-talk, part refined affectation: hope was written and pronounced as ‘whop’; you became ‘oo’. Vowels were compressed and extended so that cucumber became ‘cowcumber’, yellow ‘yaller’, gold ‘goold’, and spoil rhymed with mile. Stresses fell on unexpected syllables, such as bal-cony instead of bal-cony and con-template.4 By the middle of the next century all Whigs would speak in the Drawl, transforming a family tradition into a symbol of political allegiance, but in Georgiana’s time it remained the Circle’s own patois. Lord Pelham was moved to warn a friend: ‘I hope you will love the Dss and forgive some of her peculiarities – but above all do not adopt their manners … I have never known anybody that has lived much with them without catching something of their manner.’5
At its broadest the Circle numbered more than a hundred people; at its most intimate, thirty. In modern terms they were London’s ‘café society’: the racier members of the aristocracy mixed with professional artists and actors, scroungers, libertines and wits. The playwright and arch-scrounger Richard Brinsley Sheridan was one of its stars. An incorrigible drinker, womanizer and plotter, he embodied the best and worst of the Circle. He was brilliant yet lazy, kind-hearted and yet remiss over honouring his debts to the point of dishonesty. Sheridan disliked paying his creditors on the grounds that ‘paying only encourages them’. He once shook his head at the sight of a friend settling his account, saying, ‘What a waste …’6 He was introduced to Georgiana through his wife, the beautiful and talented singer Elizabeth Linley. Then at the pinnacle of her career, Elizabeth consented to perform at Devonshire House so long as she could be accompanied by her husband. Sheridan’s sole success at the time, The Rivals, did not gain him an invitation on his own account. Notwithstanding his inauspicious introduction as Elizabeth’s escort, Sheridan worked feverishly to ingratiate himself into the Circle. He made it his business to be entertaining, to be useful, to know every secret and to have a hand in every intrigue. Having secured his place, he encouraged his wife to relinquish her career and only the very fortunate heard her sing again.*
David Garrick was another celebrated theatrical member of the Circle. After watching him give a pre-supper performance, Georgiana wrote: ‘I have no terms to express the horror of Mr Garrick’s reading Macbeth. I have not recovered yet, it is the finest and most dreadful thing I ever saw or heard, for his action and countenance is as expressive and terrible as his voice. It froze my blood as I heard him …’7 Second to Garrick in celebrity was the sculptress Mrs Damer, whose heads of Father Thames and the goddess Isis still adorn Henley Bridge. Rumour hinted that she had lesbian tendencies although there was a more obvious explanation for the failure of her marriage: the Hon. John Damer was a pathetic drunk and gamester. In August 1775 he shot himself through the head in a room above the Bedford Arms at Covent Garden after having ruined them both in a single night.
The Craufurd brothers – the francophile James, known as ‘Fish’ because he could be extraordinarily selfish, and Quentin, known as ‘Flesh’ – were renowned connoisseurs of art whose presence lent an intellectual quality to Devonshire House suppers. Their conversational skill was matched by the famous wit James Hare, Georgiana’s particular favourite. ‘He has a manner of placing every object in so new a light,’ she explained to her mother, ‘that his kind of wit always surprises as much as it pleases.’*8 Hare was also discreet and trustworthy – rare attributes, Georgiana discovered, in the Devonshire House world. Even the ‘mere’ politicians of the Circle were celebrated for their other achievements, like the playwright and satirist General Richard Fitzpatrick, who wrote the enormously successful Rolliad. Georgiana also felt a special affection for the Whig politician and bibliophile Thomas Grenville, who reputedly never married because of his hopeless love for her. These conquerors of the drawing room were joined by such sportsmen as the Duke of Dorset who, when he was not making a reputation for himself as the debaucher of other men’s wives, transformed cricket into the national game. The Earl of Derby, whose wife was one of Dorset’s conquests, and Lord Clermont promoted British horse racing with the establishment of the Oaks and the Derby.
The women, who were no less extraordinary, divided into those who were received by polite society and those who were not. The socially proscribed women included Georgiana’s cousin Lady Diana Spencer, who had committed adultery with Topham Beauclerk in order to provoke her violent husband Lord Bolingbroke into divorcing her. Although an outcast in society, Lady Diana enjoyed equal status at Devonshire House with the ‘beauties’ and celebrated hostesses. Among these were Lady Clermont, a great favourite at Versailles, Lady Derby, who had once hoped to marry the Duke of Devonshire, and Lady Jersey, who used her ‘irresistible seduction and fascination’ to wreck the marriages of her friends. According to a contemporary, she was ‘clever, unprincipled, but beautiful and fascinating’.9 Mrs Bouverie, whom Reynolds painted to much acclaim, and the conversationalist Mrs Crewe completed the inner group of respectable women. They were highly competitive and spent much of their time putting one another down. Although greatly respected by her politician friends, and a confidante of Edmund Burke, Mrs Crewe was dismissed by Lady Douglas as ‘very fat with a considerable quantity of visible down about her mouth … her ideas came so quick that [Lady Douglas] could not follow them, nor she believed Mrs Crewe herself’.
Lady Spencer had mixed feelings about the female members of the Circle, but she loathed one woman in particular: Lady Melbourne. Beautiful, clever and ruthless, Lady Melbourne epitomized the decadence of Georgiana’s friends. The incurable gossip Lord Glenbervie recorded in his diary, ‘it was a very general report and belief that … Lord Coleraine sold Lady Melbourne to Lord Egremont for £13,000, that both Lady and Lord Melbourne were parties to this contract and had each a share of the money.’10 The story might even have been true. Lord Melbourne was an enigma, a silent figure in the drawing room whom visitors to Melbourne House barely noticed. Once Lady Melbourne had presented him with an heir he allowed her the freedom to do and see whom she pleased. He also profited by it. She was not a woman to give her affections indiscriminately. Through her efforts Lord Melbourne was made a viscount in 1781, and later a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in the Prince of Wales’s household. Two of her five children were the offspring of Lord Egremont; another, George, the result of her affair with the Prince of Wales. Only the eldest and possibly the youngest were Lord Melbourne’s.
Before Georgiana’s entry into the ton Lady Melbourne had reigned as its leading hostess. People naturally assumed that they would become rivals, but Lady Melbourne had no intention of setting herself up in opposition to Georgiana. She befriended her and adopted the role of benign older counsel instead. ‘My dearest Thémire’ (the French term for Themis, the Goddess of Justice) was how Georgiana usually addressed her. Lady Melbourne was a natural manager of people. She had a firm grasp of the recondite laws which governed life within the ton, and an unsentimental, even cynical view of humanity. ‘Never trust a man with another’s secret,’ she is reputed to have said, ‘never trust a woman with her own.’ Ferociously practical and discreet, she could also be sarcastic and cutting when irritated. Georgiana was in awe of her temper; ‘I believe I have been a little afraid of you,’ she once admitted.11 ‘Pray write to me, tell me that you love me and are not angry with me,’ she pleaded on another occasion.12
Lady Melbourne provided the comradeship that was missing in Georgiana’s relationship with her mother. Lady Spencer was always commenting and offering advice, but it was hardly ever of the practical kind that could help her daughter out of scrapes. She was too far removed from the Circle to understand the sort of pressures that it exerted. Jealous of Lady Melbourne’s influence, she tried to make Georgiana drop her. Uncharacteristically, Georgiana refused to obey:
I conjure you my Dst. Mama to forgive my warmth about Lady Melbourne today [she wrote after a painful argument]. But I do assure you that everything I have known of her has been so right and her conduct to me so truly friendly and for my good, [that] I was miserable to see her so low in your opinion – I hope you will not object to my continuing a friendship which it would be so terrible for me to break off, and I am sure that next year from a thousand things you will not have to be uneasy about my goings on.13
Georgiana’s ‘goings on’ had become an obsession with the press. Her clothes, her movements, her friends – in short anything new or unusual about her – was considered newsworthy. Rarely did a week go by without a snippet of gossip appearing somewhere. On 30 December 1776 the Morning Post reported that Georgiana and Lady Jersey had all their friends playing ‘newly invented aenigmas’ which, the Post learned, they called ‘charades’.14 Throughout 1777 a series of anonymous publications appeared addressed to Georgiana, some of them attacking her slavish devotion to fashion, others defending her.15 More often, though, the scandal sheets embroiled her in fictitious escapades with numerous lovers. There were enough stories of licentious behaviour attached to members of the Circle to give any allegation the veneer of plausibility.
Audiences flocked to Drury Lane in May 1777 to see Sheridan’s new play The School for Scandal, partly because it was known to be a satire on the Devonshire House Circle. ‘I can assure you that the Farce is charming,’ enthused Mrs Crewe to Lady Clermont; ‘the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Worseley, and I cut very good figures in it.’16 Sheridan pandered to the audience’s expectations by portraying Georgiana’s friends as a set of louche aristocrats whose moral sensibilities had been blunted by a life of wealth without responsibility. Georgiana is Lady Teazle: young, easily influenced, possessed of a good heart but needing a firm husband to manage her properly. As the play opens Sir Peter Teazle is quarrelling with Lady Teazle over her spendthrift ways and her preoccupation with fashion. ‘I’m sure I’m not more extravagant than a woman of fashion ought to be,’ she retorts. The evil Lady Sneerwell (a mixture of Lady Jersey and Lady Melbourne) connives with the journalist Snake (Sheridan) and Joseph Surface to bring about Lady Teazle’s ruin. But the play ends with Lady Teazle resisting Surface’s attempt to seduce her and renouncing her scandal-loving friends as worthless and silly. Members of the Circle thought it was a tremendous joke to see themselves caricatured on stage, and helped to publicize the play by ostentatiously arriving en masse to watch the first night.
Georgiana’s thoughts on being portrayed as Lady Teazle have not survived, but the play almost certainly made her uneasy. Behind the broad humour was a semi-serious message which did not escape her notice. ‘I am alarm’d at my own dispositions because I think I know them now,’ she told Lady Spencer in August. ‘I am afraid that the minute I think seriously of my conduct I shall be so shocked, especially with regard to all that has happened this year …’17 Lacking the maturity and confidence to stand up to her friends, Georgiana was being drawn into a life of heavy drinking and compulsive gambling. She often found herself acting against her own judgement but she felt unable to resist the pressures on her to conform.
In November 1777 Lady Sarah Lennox observed that Georgiana seemed to have no ballast. ‘The Pretty Duchess of Devonshire who by all accounts has no faults but delicate health in my mind, dines at seven, summer as well as winter, goes to bed at three, and lies in bed till four: she has hysteric fits in the morning and dances in the evening; she bathes, rides, dances for ten days and lies in bed the next ten.’ Georgiana made periodic attempts to reform. As often as she could she presented Lady Spencer with a positive picture of her life, emphasizing the time she spent with the Duke, her involvement in charity work, the frequent prayers she said and the sermons she heard. ‘You see my dearest Mama, how happy I am to tell you of anything I think you will approve of,’ she had written in September 1776; ‘it gives me such real pleasure to feel that I am doing anything that makes me more pleasing to the best of mothers.’18 Inspired by such sentiments, Georgiana would adopt a starvation diet, lock herself away in her room and see no one for a week, but as soon as she emerged she compensated with all-night drinking and eating binges until she was too exhausted to get out of bed. Her weight fluctuated wildly as a consequence. ‘You are very apt to be too much so, and run into extremes which your constitution will not bear,’ Lady Spencer complained.19 The effect on Georgiana’s general health was catastrophic: she had one miscarriage after another, leading the Duke and the Cavendishes to accuse her of deliberately sabotaging their hopes for an heir. Only Lady Sarah Lennox questioned whether the Duke might not be to blame for neglecting Georgiana when she was young and so vulnerable to suggestion. ‘Indeed,’ she concluded, ‘I can’t forgive her or rather her husband, the fault of ruining her health.’20
Just as Lady Sarah Lennox made her astute observation, towards the end of 1777, Georgiana met two quite different people, Charles James Fox and Mary Graham, whose impact on her would have far-reaching consequences. She was introduced to Mary in October while taking the sea air in Brighton. Mary was there with her husband, Thomas, and was recuperating from a bout of pneumonia. Georgiana was there in the hope of improving her fertility. Medical opinion cited a weak placenta as the cause of serial miscarriages like Georgiana’s; the only remedy was to take water cures, either bathing in sea water or drinking warm spa water. (There was no concept of male infertility in the eighteenth century, except in cases of impotence.)
Georgiana was immediately captivated by her. ‘Mr and Mrs Graham came the same day as the Duke and Dss,’ reported Lady Clermont to Lady Spencer; ‘she is a very pretty sort of woman, the Dss likes her of all things; they are inseparable, which is no bad thing. I wish she had half a dozen more such favourites.’21 Mary’s father, Lord Cathcart, was formerly the British envoy to Russia, and she had lived abroad for much of her life. Lady Cathcart had died when Mary was fourteen and she had since been obliged to act as a surrogate mother to her baby sister, Charlotte. Georgiana and Mary were the same age and had married in the same year, but Mary lived a very different, sheltered life. She was quiet, serious and gentle – Georgiana might not have noticed her were it not for her breathtaking beauty: she was known as ‘the beautiful Mrs Graham’. Gainsborough painted her portrait at least four times in an attempt to capture the serenity of her features.
The obvious mutual attachment between the two women was remarked upon at Brighton, although Georgiana made light of it to Lady Spencer. ‘I live very much with Mrs Graham,’ she wrote en passant. ‘I think her extremely amiable and we like him too very much – but Lady Sefton does not approve of it as I suppose she expected I should live entirely with her.’22 However, the letters Georgiana wrote to Mary after they had left Brighton show that their feelings for each other had grown into infatuation. The first surviving letter of Georgiana’s is a response to a reproach from Mary for not writing more often. Georgiana was staying at Althorp with Lady Spencer, who regarded the interlude as her chance to initiate some remedial training. She kept a tight rein on her daughter, insisting that she imitate her own daily regimen of early morning walks, hours of improving literature, and endless fussing about the servants. The unaccustomed harshness of the regime so exhausted Georgiana that she was too tired to keep up the promised letter-journal to Mary.
I cannot bear the thought of your thinking me negligent [she replied in anguish after receiving a furious letter from Mary] I have had scarce any opportunity lately – and besides I have been very busy – in the first place with writing the verses to my Father on his birthday and with the picture – (As soon as I have time to write them out I will send them to you) and then, I have been working very hard for Mama to compose her some reflections to read to the servants on their taking the Sacrament. Would you believe me capable of so serious a work? My dear friend, despite my giddiness I am capable of thought sometimes. You would not think from appearances that I am able to have deep friendships, but, nevertheless you must know how tenderly I love you. It is the same with other things. I am full of madness but I also have a little sense. I perceive I am eulogising myself, but that is characteristic of a bad heart and I have often told you mine is bad … I am falling asleep and must leave you now, but I want to say to you above all that I love you, my dear friend, and kiss you tenderly.23
By the spring of 1778 it was Lady Spencer’s turn to complain that Georgiana’s letters had slowed to a trickle.24 Not only did Georgiana spend all her free time writing to Mary; no other subject interested her: ‘I made Mr James set by me at supper last night to have the pleasure of talking about you – it is so deliciously sweet for me, my adorable friend, to speak constantly of you – as I am continuously thinking of you it is a subject that I am very well prepared for … I went to see Lady Anne and Lady Margaret, they both talk a great deal about you and my heart applauds their good taste – I have seen your picture too at Gainsborough’s.’25
Both of them were frightened that the intensity of their friendship would become the subject of gossip. It was almost impossible to keep such things hidden. Maids and footmen were not above reading their employers’ mail, and there was always the danger of letters going astray or falling into the wrong hands. In one fragment Georgiana wrote: ‘I have been reading over this curious letter and I am almost sorry I put so much about what vex’d me when I began writing, I must tell you I am quite easy about it now and if I was sure you would get this letter safe, I would tell you all about it – but I don’t dare.’26 Despite the risk of exposure, she urged Mary to accept a small drawing of herself: ‘You desire me to give you my opinion about the picture, I can not see why you should not have it, I understand what you mean, but I don’t think it would appear odd – consider that in a little time we shall be old friends – however I think I can send you a drawing when I go to town which will not have any of the inconveniences you thought of as you need not shew it – for I shall like you to have something like me.’27
Whether or not Mary actually received the picture is not known. Almost nothing else survives from their lengthy correspondence except a couple of later fragments. Discouraged by the Duke’s freezing civility, Georgiana longed for the tenderness, companionship and affection she experienced with Mary – and also something else, equally if not more important: relief from having to perform for her relatives or the ton. Lady Spencer, her friends, the Duke and his family all placed expectations on her, often forcing her to play roles which made her feel uncomfortable or inadequate. Only with Mary could Georgiana unburden herself and talk about her confusion and dismay.
The hurry I live here distracts me [she wrote in 1778], when I first came into the world the novelty of the scene made me like everything but my heart now feels only an emptiness in the beau monde which cannot be filled – I don’t have the liberty to think or occupy myself with the things I like as much as I would wish and all my desires are turned upside down – you are the only person to whom I would say this, anybody else would only laugh at me and call it an affectation – I seem to enjoy every thing so much at the minute that nobody can think how much I am tired sometimes with the dissipation I live in.28
Georgiana’s sense of unease about her life of dissipation was turning to disgust but, as she remarked sadly, her friends would only laugh if she tried to explain herself. Her intimacy with Mary helped her to gain a perspective on her situation, particularly on the limitations of her marriage. It was unthinkable, however, for a woman to take a lover before she had supplied her husband with a son. Convention allowed aristocratic women a cicisbeo – a term borrowed from the Italian to mean a platonic lover who provided escort duties and other practical services in place of the husband. In The School for Scandal Lady Teazle says she will admit the wicked Joseph Surface ‘as a lover no farther than fashion sanctions’. ‘True,’ he replies, ‘a mere Platonic cicisbeo – what every wife is entitled to.’29 But, despite a large crowd of suitors eager to comply, Georgiana was the exception in lacking even this.30 In 1779 her cousin Lady Pembroke remarked to Lord Herbert: ‘You wrote some time ago terrible things you had heard about the poor Dss of Devonshire, which made me laugh, they were so totally without foundation, and I forgot to answer it. She has never been even talked for any body in the flirting way yet …’31
Whether and to what extent physical intimacy played a part in Georgiana’s relationship with Mary is impossible to determine. Several of her friendships contained an element of flirtatiousness: it was a French habit she had acquired from Madame de Polignac and Marie Antoinette. Since the publication of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s enormously successful Julie ou La nouvelle Héloïse French women had self-consciously imitated the loving friendship between Julie and Claire. However, there were rumours that Marie Antoinette and the Little Po were more than simply friends, which their displays of physical affection encouraged.32*
Rousseau made a deep impression on Georgiana, and her own copy of La nouvelle Héloïse at Chatsworth is scored with her markings.33 She lived on a plane of heightened feeling which her English friends found alluring but also disturbing. ‘Some part of your letter frightened me,’ Lady Jersey once wrote, not altogether sure how to interpret Georgiana’s declarations of love.34 Georgiana’s passionate imprecations went far beyond the ordinary endearments written between women friends, ‘Je t’aime mon coeur bien tendrement, indeed, indeed, indeed, I love you dearly’ is one of her typical messages to Lady Melbourne.35 However, even taking hyperbole into account, Georgiana’s letters to Mary were more personal, more intense, clearly separating them from her other correspondence. Georgiana was seeking her Claire, who would know her every thought, be at her side during the day, share her bed at night, and hold her in her arms when she died. But it was not to be. In 1781 the doctors ordered Mr Graham to take Mary to a warmer climate: it was the only hope for her weak lungs. They had diagnosed her as consumptive. Georgiana was bereft and searched without success for a replacement.
Charles James Fox, her second new acquaintance, made a great impression on Georgiana, not in a romantic way – that would emerge later – but intellectually. It was Fox, more than anyone else, who led Georgiana to her life’s vocation – politics. Fox was a brilliant though flawed politician. Short and corpulent, with shaggy eyebrows and a permanent five o’clock shadow, he was already at twenty-eight marked down as a future leader of the Whig party when the Marquess of Rockingham retired. Georgiana became friends with him when he came to stay at Chatsworth in 1777. His career until then had veered between political success and failure, between unimaginable wealth and bankruptcy. He confounded his critics with his irrepressible confidence, and exasperated his friends by his incontinent lifestyle. Eighteenth-century England was full of wits, connoisseurs, orators, historians, drinkers, gamblers, rakes and pranksters, but only Fox embodied all these things.
He was born in 1749, the second of the three surviving sons of the Whig politician Henry Fox, first Baron Holland, and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. Although an unscrupulous and – even for the age – corrupt politician, Lord Holland was a tender husband and an indulgent father who shamelessly spoilt his children. No eighteenth-century upbringing has received more attention or encountered such criticism as Fox’s. By contemporary social standards the Holland household was a kind of freak show. There were stories of Fox casually burning his father’s carefully prepared speeches, smashing his gold watch to see how it would look broken, disrupting his dinners – and never being punished.
Having enjoyed such an unrestricted existence, both materially and emotionally, Fox was similarly open and generous with his friends. He was incapable of small-mindedness or petty ambition. It was this, coupled with his natural talent for leadership, which won him instant popularity at Eton and enduring friendships throughout his life. Before he joined the Whig party Fox seemed to have no ambition except pleasure and no political loyalties except to his father’s reputation. This he vigorously defended in parliament against charges that, as Paymaster-General during the Seven Years War, Lord Holland had embezzled the country out of millions. No one could deny that the family had become unaccountably rich during this period. However, after his father’s death in 1774 Fox did his best to return the fortune to the nation by gambling it away at Newmarket and Brooks’s.
Lord Holland’s last act before he died had been to pay off his son’s £140,000 debt,36 but this generous gift had no effect on Fox’s behaviour. He stayed up night after night, fighting his body’s urge to sleep with coffee and platefuls of food. According to one anecdote, he played hazard continuously from Tuesday to Wednesday night, winning, losing, recovering and finally losing all his money. He stopped on Thursday to rush to the House of Commons to participate in a debate on the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and went straight back to White’s afterwards. There he drank until Friday morning, when he walked to Almack’s and gambled until 4 p.m. Having won £6,000 he rode to Newmarket, where he lost £10,000.37 Though he very quickly frittered everything away, Fox could always count on friends like the Duke to support him financially and politically.* Occasionally he won money but he avoided games of skill, which he was very good at, for the excitement of games of chance. He spent so many hours at Brooks’s that he was rarely out of his gambling clothes.†
Fox displayed a sense of fun and theatre that equalled Georgiana’s. The term ‘macaroni’ was coined to describe the fashionable young fops of the 1770s who wore exaggerated clothes about town. The term probably originated in the 1760s, when members of the short-lived Macaroni Club brought attention to themselves by their predilection for all things foreign, especially food. Macaronis were much criticized in the press. The Oxford Magazine complained: ‘There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’38 Until his gambling debts made him poor, Fox was one of its most visible exemplars. Like Georgiana, he had an eye for colour and a talent for whimsy. The macaroni uniform strove for a super-slim elegance with narrow breeches and short, tight-fitting waistcoats. The flourish was in the finishes: large buttons and extravagant nosegays were essential; high-heeled shoes and a small hat perched on the side of the head added a certain flair. Fox’s particular contribution was to experiment with hair colour, powdering his hair blue one day, red the next. He wore multi-coloured shoes and velvet frills, a daring combination which challenged the fainthearted to follow him.
He went to stay at Chatsworth in August 1777, joining a large house party that included the Jerseys, the Clermonts, the Duke of Dorset, all the Cavendishes as well as their cousins the Ponsonbys, and the violinist Giardini. The week before his arrival Georgiana had written of her alarm and distress ‘at my own dispositions’. But she hid her feelings from her guests and no one noticed that her liveliness was as much a performance as the after-dinner entertainments.
Fox’s presence wrought an immediate change in Georgiana; he intrigued and stimulated her. For the first time since her initial attempts to educate herself two years before, she had found someone to emulate.
The great merit of C. Fox is his amazing quickness in seazing any subject’ [she wrote to her mother in August]. He seems to have the particular talent of knowing more about what he is saying and with less pains than anyone else. His conversation is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff puff – and what makes him more entertaining now is his being here with Mr Townsend and the D. of Devonshire, for their living so much together makes them show off to one another. Their chief topic is Politics and Shakespear. As for the latter they all three seem to have the most astonishing memorys for it, and I suppose I shall be able in time to go thro’ a play as they do …39
In her next letter Georgiana informed her mother that she was reading Vertot’s Revolutions of Sweden. ‘I think it is the most interesting book in the world, I really was quite agitated with my anxiety for Gustavas Vasa,’ she wrote. ‘Especially at seeing a generous and open hearted Hero fighting for the liberty of his country and to revenge the memory of an injur’d friend against lawless cruelty and oppressive tyranny.’40 This was the Whig political creed in a single line: the hero fighting for liberty against lawless cruelty and oppressive tyranny. In practical terms for the Rockingham Whig party of the 1770s it meant opposition to George III, a mistrust of the powers of the crown and a vigilance over civil liberties. Fox had probably suggested Vertot to Georgiana. He had only lately converted to Whiggism, having served as a junior minister in the treasury until his outrageous behaviour and erratic support drove George III and Lord North to remove him. ‘Indeed,’ the King wrote in disgust, ‘that young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honour and honesty that he must become as contemptible as he is odious.’41 After his dismissal Fox became the protégé of Edmund Burke and under his tutelage recast his political ideas. The politician who once declared ‘[I] will not be a rebel to my King, my country or my own heart, for the loudest huzza of the inconsiderate multitude’ now claimed that the King ‘held nothing but what he held in trust for the people, for their use and benefit’.42
Fox’s ardour moved Georgiana. He talked to her as no one else did, treating her as his equal, discussing his ideas and encouraging her participation. She had once visited the House of Commons out of curiosity with Lady Jersey (women were banned from the gallery in 1778), but had not repeated the experiment. Fox awakened in her a sense of loyalty and commitment to the Whig party. By the time he left Chatsworth she was his devoted follower. Twenty years later she was still his most loyal supporter. ‘Charles always had faults,’ was all she would concede, ‘that may injure him and have as a Statesman – but never as the greatest of men.’43 Like his contemporaries at Eton and later at Brooks’s she had fallen under Fox’s spell. His following in parliament depended as much on his personality as on his views. To be a Foxite meant that one belonged to a gang whose single bond was an uncritical admiration of Fox.
Fox and Mary’s belief in Georgiana persuaded her that she could make something more of herself. In April 1778 she wrote of her desire to begin afresh. ‘I have the strongest sense of having many things to repent of and my heart is fully determined to mend,’ she told Lady Spencer; she planned to take Holy Communion (a rite less commonly performed in the eighteenth century) after her trip to Derby. But the same letter also hints at entanglements – gambling debts – which she regretted and feared. ‘By going there I break off many unpleasant embarrassments I am in with regard to others and the quiet life I shall lead there will give me time to think …’44
The result was a thinly disguised autobiographical novel called The Sylph. Notwithstanding its exaggerations, the book can be read as a roman à clef. Written as a series of letters, the story follows the misadventures of Julia Stanley, a naive country girl married to the dissipated Sir William Stanley, a rake whose only interests are fashion and gambling. When Julia first comes to London she does not understand the ways of the ton, but slowly it seduces her and she becomes trapped. She learns how to live à la mode, how to spend hours dressing for a ball, how to talk, sing, dance and think like a fashionable person. She realizes that her soul is being corrupted by the cynicism and heartlessness which pervades the ton, but sees no hope of escape. Sir William is cruel, even brutal towards her. His only concern is that she should be a credit to him in public. He flaunts his mistress in front of her, punishes her when she suffers a miscarriage, and is not above assaulting her when angered. As his creditors close in, Sir William forces Julia to sign over all her personal property. (Nor is she the only woman in the book to suffer from male abuse. An aristocratic lady who loses a fortune at the gaming table is blackmailed by a friend into sleeping with him in return for his silence.)* Julia’s friend Lady Besford, who is obviously modelled on Lady Melbourne, urges her to accept her life and find happiness where she can. Julia is facing moral ruin when an anonymous protector, calling himself ‘the Sylph’, begins sending her letters of advice. Finally Sir William becomes so desperate for money that he sells the rights to Julia’s body to his chief creditor. She runs away, and he shoots himself in a shabby room above an inn.† The Sylph then reveals himself to be Julia’s childhood sweetheart. They marry and live happily ever after.
Georgiana wrote The Sylph in secret and published it anonymously as ‘a young lady’.45 The novel was a creditable success, quickly going through four editions; it was not long before people guessed the identity of the author. When challenged in public Georgiana refused to comment, but it became common knowledge that she had admitted the truth in private. There were plenty of clues pointing in her direction, not only in her choice of names, which are all variations on those of her friends, but in the sly references to herself: Julia’s hairdresser protests that ‘he had run the risk of disobliging the Duchess of D—, by giving me the preference of the finest bunch of radishes that had yet come over from Paris’. Like Georgiana, Julia has a younger sister whom she adores and a worldly, older female companion to whom she turns for advice. The similarities in style and phrasing between the novel and Georgiana’s letters allayed any lingering doubts. Georgiana often wrote of her longing for a moral guide: ‘Few can boast like me of having such a friend and finding her in a mother,’ she once wrote to Lady Spencer, adding how much she depended on her for moral and spiritual advice. ‘I should be very happy if I could borrow some friendly Sylph (if any are so kind as to hover about Hardwick) and a pair of wings that I might Pay you now and then a visit.’46
Part of The Sylph’s success was due to its notoriety. Readers were shocked by the sexual licence and violence it depicted. The Gentleman’s Magazine was appalled: the anonymous female author, it thought, showed ‘too great a knowledge of the ton, and of the worst, though perhaps highest part of the world’. Mrs Thrale, doyenne of the Blue Stocking Circle, denounced the book as ‘an obscene Novel’.47 She objected to passages such as the following, where Lady Besford expresses a breathtakingly cynical view of marriage:
you do not suppose my happiness proceeds from my being married, any further than that I enjoy title, rank and liberty, by bearing Lord Besford’s name. We do not disagree because we seldom meet. He pursues his pleasure one way, I seek mine another, and our dispositions being opposite, they are sure never to interfere with each other … My Lord kept a mistress from the moment of his marriage. What law excludes a woman from doing the same? Marriage now is a necessary kind of barter, and an alliance of families; – the heart is not consulted …
The Sylph touches on many subjects, not least the loneliness of a bad marriage and the vulnerability of women in a society where they are deprived of equal rights. Georgiana obviously wrote the novel in a hurry and it does not compare well with Fanny Burney’s Evelina, for example. The significance of The Sylph lies in the rare insider’s glimpse it provides of the ton. Georgiana describes a competitive, unfriendly world peopled predominantly by opportunists, liars and bullies; a world which encourages hypocrisy and values pretence. The irony did not escape her that even as she hated it she was also its creature. However, in publishing The Sylph she was also claiming her independence.
*Georgiana was not herself a snob. When Monsieur Tessier, the celebrated French actor, visited England the Duchess of Manchester refused to speak to him because he earned his living. Her behaviour disgusted Georgiana, and to make the point she danced with him at Almack’s.
* Sheridan’s friend and biographer Thomas Moore remembered his hatred of perceived rivals: ‘It was Burke chiefly that S. hated and envied (they indeed hated each other) – Being both Irishmen – both adventurers – they had every possible incentive to envy.’ Wilfrid S. Dowden, ed., The Journal of Thomas Moore (London 1983), I, p. 161.
* Hare’s seat in parliament – courtesy of the Duke – was the only barrier between him and debtors’ prison. He was fortunate enough to be the grandson of a bishop, but also unfortunate in being the son of an apothecary. He had gambled away his small inheritance and thereafter survived as a permanent house guest in Whig society. He was stick thin, with a face so white he appeared more dead than alive.
* Apparently the Queen’s brother-in-law surprised them one day while they were making up after an argument, hugging each other tightly and kissing each other’s tear-stained cheeks. He burst out laughing and left, saying, ‘Pray don’t let me disturb you!’ and told everybody how he had interrupted the two friends.
* Fox even brought a few of his friends to near bankruptcy by persuading them to provide security for him in the form of annuities to money-lenders. At one point the Earl of Carlisle was paying one sixth of his income towards the interest on Fox’s debts. Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford 1991), p. 102.
† Contemporary descriptions show how peculiar this uniform was: ‘The gamesters began by pulling off their embroidered clothes, and putting on frieze greatcoats, or turned their coats inside outwards for good luck. They put on pieces of leather (such as are worn by footmen when they clean knives) to save their laced ruffles; to shield their eyes from the light and hold up curls, etc., they wore high-crowned straw hats with broad brims, adorned with flowers and ribbons: [and] masks to conceal their emotions when they played at quinze.’ J. Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London 1872), p. 72.
* When he wrote his memoirs in 1801 Colonel George Hanger, a former lover of Lady Melbourne’s, claimed that several ladies in the Devonshire House Circle had fallen into the same trap.
†In circumstances very similar to the suicide of Mrs Damer’s husband in 1775.
4A Popular Patriot 1778–1781
Saturday Morning the Derbyshire Militia passed through the city on their road to Cox Heath. The Duke of Devonshire marched at their head. The whole regiment made a very noble appearance, equal to any regulars whatever. If the militia of the other counties prove but as good, there is no doubt but that they are a match for any force that can be brought against them. The Duchess of Devonshire followed the regiment, dressed en militaire, and was escorted by several attendants.
London Chronicle, 20–23 June 1778
One day last week, her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire appeared on the hustings at Covent Garden. She immediately saluted her favourite Candidate, the Hon. Charles Fox.
Morning Post, 25 September 1780
GEORGIANA’S POLITICAL AWAKENING coincided with a disastrous year for the Whigs. The Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776 proclaimed the American colonies ‘Free and Independent States … absolved from all allegiance to the British crown’. The Whigs supported the colonists against the government but their rousing talk of safeguarding the liberty of the people had signally failed to impress the country. The public rejected their contention that the government was at fault for having tried to force an unjust system of taxation on the colonists, and the press accused the party of conniving with Britain’s enemies to break up the empire. It was an unfair accusation although it touched on a dilemma for the Whigs: they viewed the American conflict through the prism of Westminster politics and regarded it as part of the struggle between the people and the crown. For this reason they privately hoped that the Americans would win.
In February 1778 France entered the war on the side of the Americans, transforming what had hitherto been a set of military skirmishes in New England into a trans-continental war. Britain now had to fight on several fronts. Shaken by this new threat, the Prime Minister Lord North hoped to strengthen the cabinet by poaching Charles Fox and one or two others, but his overtures were rejected. The debates in parliament became bitter as Whig and government MPs accused each other of betraying the country’s interests. The sense of crisis was heightened in April by the dramatic death of William Pitt the Elder during a debate in the House of Lords. The former Prime Minister, now the Earl of Chatham, had risen from his sick bed to make his final speech. He arrived draped in black velvet, and dragged himself to his old seat with the help of crutches. Speaking in the government’s defence, he argued that a surrender to the Americans would signal the end of the empire – the empire he had won for Britain almost thirty years earlier. Only the Duke of Richmond, Fox’s uncle and a committed Whig, dared to answer the respected statesman. He argued that it was impossible to fight a war on two fronts against the Americans and the French. Chatham slowly pulled himself to his feet to reply, but no words came out. He shuddered, clutched his heart and collapsed to the floor. To many MPs Chatham’s death in the throes of a patriotic speech seemed to symbolize Britain’s approaching demise.
Having enjoyed two years of a distant war, the country now began to mobilize its defences against the threat of a French invasion. As Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire the Duke of Devonshire returned to the country to organize a voluntary militia. Most able-bodied men were either already in the army or in stable employment; those available to join the home defence force made unpromising material. This did not deter the aristocracy, who threw themselves into the task of training their corps with almost childish enthusiasm. Many of them proudly wore their regimental uniforms to the King’s birthday celebrations at St James’s.1
Since the French were likely to target London first, the government set up two campsites for its protection: Coxheath in Kent and Warley in Essex. So many sightseers flocked to the camps that a London – Coxheath coach service started. The London Chronicle reported that Coxheath camp would be three miles long, holding 15,000 men and representing the ‘flower of the nobility’. Workers were building a stone pavilion in anticipation of a royal visit. Meanwhile ‘the Tradespeople of the neighbouring places are deserting their town residents, and are likewise encamping round us in the various temporary streets. The whole will form one of the most striking military spectacles ever exhibited in the country.’2
Georgiana accompanied the Duke to Coxheath, where they were joined by many of their friends. She was enthralled by the spectacle of thousands of men mobilizing for war. She walked behind the Duke as he inspected his regiment, imagining herself bravely leading a battalion of men in a bloody engagement against the invaders. Although women were not usually tolerated on the field, the officers indulged her desire to take part in the preparations. ‘There is a vacant company which the soldiers call mine,’ she confided to her brother. ‘I intend to make it a very good one.’3 The Duke rented a large house for her nearby, but she persuaded him to allow her to live in the camp with him. Their ‘tent’ was made up of several marquees, arranged into a compound of sleeping quarters, entertaining rooms, kitchens and a servants’ hall. Refusing to equate a state of readiness with austerity, Georgiana decorated it with travelling tables, oriental rugs and silver candlesticks from Chatsworth. Nevertheless conditions in the camp were primitive and sanitary arrangements non-existent.
Her letters during these weeks are full of military matters – manoeuvres and parades. In May she wrote to Lady Spencer:
I got up very early and went to the field. The soldiers fir’d very well and I stood by the Duke and Cl Gladwin, who were near enough to have their faces smart with gun-powder, but I was not fortunate enough to have this honour. After the firing was over, Major Revel, whose gout prevents him from walking, sat a horseback to be saluted as General. The Duke of Devonshire took his post at the head of his company, and after marching about they came by Major Revel and saluted him. The D. really does it vastly well …4
By mid-June, however, Georgiana was feeling less welcome on the field: the Duke had grown tired of her presence and the soldiers no longer regarded her as a novelty. She stopped loitering around the guns and reluctantly joined her friends in their card parties, carriage rides and jolly picnics on the hills overlooking the camp. Over veal cake and tea with Lady Melbourne and Mrs Crewe she discovered that they too were bored and wished to do more than simply observe the soldiers. Their complaints gave her courage. It occurred to her that even though women were barred from taking part in military action, there was nothing to stop her from organizing a female auxiliary corps. She had soon designed a smart uniform that combined elegance with masculinity, using a tailored version of a man’s riding coat over a close-fitting dress. In July the Morning Post informed its readers: ‘Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire appears every day at the head of the beauteous Amazons on Coxheath, who are all dressed en militaire; in the regimentals that distinguish the several regiments in which their Lords, etc., serve, and charms every beholder with their beauty and affability.’5 She continued to parade throughout the summer, inspiring women in other camps to follow suit. The Marchioness of Granby bought a half share in a sixteen-gun ship and had it renamed after her.6
Although Georgiana and her friends did little more than dress up in uniforms and provide good cheer for the men, she had broken with tradition. For the first time aristocratic women organized themselves as a voluntary group, taking up duties to help their men in time of war. Following the publicity they generated Georgiana was particularly gratified by the congratulations she received from the Whig grandees. Her idea of dressing up in patriotic uniforms was a propaganda coup for the Whigs, who had suffered for their opposition to the war. They had been labelled by the press as ‘Patriots’ in reference to Dr Johnson’s apothegm about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. Georgiana’s display of military fervour helped to mitigate public hostility towards them and restore the party’s popularity.
Georgiana’s pleasure at her success was short-lived: one day she discovered that the Duke and Lady Jersey had been taking advantage of her parades through the camp to visit each other’s tents. Possibly jealous of the attention Georgiana was receiving and feeling neglected, the Duke made no effort to keep the affair a secret. Lady Jersey went further and flaunted her conquest in front of Georgiana, who was too frightened and inexperienced to assert herself.7 Lady Jersey regarded all married men – except her husband, who was twice her age – as an irresistible challenge. (When a ribald article appeared about her in the Morning Post in 1777 it shocked only Lord Jersey. They happened to be staying at Chatsworth at the time and he embarrassed everyone by announcing that he loved his wife and would ‘shew the world he did not believe them’.)8 Lady Jersey always tormented the wives of her conquests, and fond though she was of Georgiana she couldn’t resist the urge to humiliate her friend. According to Lady Clermont, she ‘asked the Duchess if she could give her a bed [at Coxheath]. She said she was afraid not, the other said, “then I will have a bed in your room.” So that in the house she is to be. Pray, write to the Duchess,’ she asked Lady Spencer, ‘that you hope, in short, I don’t know what …’9
Georgiana’s timidity puzzled her mother – although hurt and mortified it seems that she said nothing to either party. For once Lady Spencer showed a certain sensitivity and, instead of remonstrating with her daughter, made an unaccustomed effort to praise her and boost her confidence. ‘Your behaviour is in every respect just what it ought to be,’ she wrote in July, referring to Georgiana’s visit to nearby Tunbridge Wells. A local newspaper had reported that the townspeople felt snubbed by the grandees at Coxheath, so Georgiana attended the Assembly Rooms with Lady Clermont and Mrs Crewe, where the master of ceremonies welcomed them to much applause. ‘I believe it with great reason,’ Lady Spencer continued, ‘that if you continue as you have begun you will gain the love and admiration of all who see you.’*12
It was not long, however, before the chiding resumed: ‘I suspect’, she complained in August, ‘you put on … a great deal more familiarity and ease than is necessary or proper to the men about you.’13 As usual, Lady Spencer’s criticisms were not without cause. ‘I believe the Dss of D one of the most amiable beings in the world,’ Mrs Montagu wrote after meeting her at Tunbridge Wells. ‘She has a form and face extremely angelick, her temper is perfectly sweet, she has fine parts, the greatest purity of heart and innocence possible.’ But, Mrs Montagu added, ‘as goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems, she does not keep so far aloof from the giddy and imprudent part of the World as one could wish.’14
The liaison between Lady Jersey and the Duke was shortlived. Fortunately for Georgiana, Lady Spencer ordered an end to the affair. Angered by Georgiana’s unwillingness to interfere, she had called on Lady Jersey and outlined the consequences she would face if it continued.11 The Spencers also gave the Duke to understand that they were disgusted with him.
By the time the King and Queen made their long-awaited official visit to Coxheath on 4 November 1778, Lady Jersey had acquired a new lover. The rain poured down on the day – ‘cats and dogs,’ Georgiana complained – and while the Duke marched his soldiers past the King, Georgiana led the delegation of ladies standing in slippery mud up to their ankles waiting on the Queen. Georgiana’s discomfort was greatly increased by the onset of what she termed ‘the Prince’, a common euphemism for menstruation. Although the rain prevented many of the planned manoeuvres from taking place, the newspapers considered the visit a success. According to Georgiana, the Duke of Devonshire was ‘reckon’d to have saluted the best of anybody’.10 However, the Devonshires’ patriotism did not extend to spending the winter in a mud pit; immediately after the royal visit they returned to Devonshire House.
Georgiana’s sense of isolation had increased as a result of the Duke’s adultery. Her ebullience became a screen which she employed to distance herself from people. She did not mind public occasions, but quiet tête-à-têtes made her uncomfortable and she tried to avoid them, though not always with success. Her reluctance to give offence made her incapable of declining an invitation. ‘I am to dine with Lady Jersey,’ Georgiana wrote to Lady Spencer a few months later. ‘To tell you the truth tho’ I love her tenderly, I have learnt to feel a kind of uneasiness in being with her, that makes our society very general – I am discontented in being with her and can’t tell her so, et ma bonhomie en souffre.’15* Despite her unease, she continued to behave towards Lady Jersey as if nothing had happened.
Other inhabitants of the camp were less fortunate than Lady Jersey – not all escaped the consequences of their actions so lightly. Lady Melbourne became pregnant with Lord Egremont’s child while Lady Clermont’s affair with the local apothecary resulted in a secret abortion. But it was Lady Derby and the Duke of Dorset who, in social terms, paid the highest price.16 Lady Mary Coke saw them together in June and rued Lady Derby’s recklessness. She wrote in her diary: ‘Lady Derby, like the Duchess of Devonshire, has bad connexions which lead her into many things that she had better not do, and for which I am sorry …’17 Her intuition proved correct. In December 1778 Lady Derby fled from her husband’s house, leaving behind her children and all her belongings. It was a widely broadcast secret that she was hiding with the Duke of Dorset. Her desertion broke one of eighteenth-century society’s strongest taboos regarding the sanctity of the family and a wife’s obedience to her husband. According to Lady Mary Coke, she had ‘offended against the laws of man and God’.18 She heard that Lady Derby’s brother the Duke of Hamilton was trying to force the Duke of Dorset to sign a legal document agreeing to marry her as soon as the divorce came through. There were other rumours: Lady Derby was pregnant; the Duke of Dorset had made another mistress pregnant; he was now in love with someone else. In February, two months after the initial excitement, Lady Sarah Lennox had this to say to her sister:
It is imagined the Duke of Dorset will marry Lady Derby, who is now in the country keeping quiet and out of the way. There is a sort of party in town of who is to visit her and who is not, which makes great squabbles, as if the curse or blessing of the poor woman depended on a few tickets more or less … I am told she has been and still is more thoroughly attached to the Duke of Dorset, and if so I suppose she will be very happy if the lessening of her visiting list is the only misfortune, and what with giving up her children, sorrow for a fault, and dread of not preserving his affections, I think she is much to be pittied.19
The Prince shared with Fox, Lord Cholmondeley and Lord George Cavendish a round robin of the three most famous courtesans of the era: Perdita, Grace Dalrymple and Mrs Armistead. Georgiana heard that Lord George had paid a drunken visit to Mrs Armistead one night only to find the Prince hiding behind a door. Luckily, rather than take offence he burst out laughing, made him a low bow and left. The Prince also pursued Lady Melbourne and Lady Jersey, or perhaps it was the other way round. Less well-informed people speculated that Georgiana was in competition with her friends for the Prince’s affection, but a letter from Lady Melbourne suggests collusion rather than rivalry:
The Duke of Richmond has been here, and told me you and I were two rival queens, and I believe, if there had not been some people in the room, who might have thought it odd, that I should have slapped his face for having such an idea; and he wished me joy of having the Prince to myself. How odious people are, upon my life, I have no patience with them. I believe you and I are very different from all the rest of the world – as from their ideas they do such strange things in certain situations or they never could suspect us in the way they do.59
The Whigs continued their onslaught against the government. On 3 June 1780 the Duke of Richmond, then a radical on the extreme left of the party, moved a resolution that the constitution should be rewritten to allow annual parliaments and universal suffrage. His plan was based on the proposals drawn up by the Westminster Association, an offshoot of Christopher Wyvil’s Association Movement which had led the petitions for parliamentary reform. By an unlucky chance, while the Lords were debating the Duke of Richmond’s proposals, Lord George Gordon, a mentally unbalanced Protestant fanatic, chose to march on parliament at the head of a large mob. He carried with him a petition from the Protestant Association, a sectarian body which opposed giving legal rights to Catholics.
Eighteenth-century society was rarely bothered by the occasional eruptions of the lower orders; the establishment ignored them and the fracas would die down of its own accord. But this mob, intoxicated by drink and whipped up by a crazed demagogue, was more dangerous than the usual over-excited rabble. The crowd blocked all the entrances to parliament while Lord George Gordon stormed into the Commons. The MPs fell silent at his entrance and sat spellbound as he harangued them on the evils of popery. He then rushed out to do the same in the Lords. In between speeches he ran to a window to shout at the crowd outside. Fearing for their lives, MPs made a dash for the stairs and as they tried to leave the House they were punched and kicked by the marchers. The Lords followed suit, ignominiously leaving older peers such as the eighty-year-old Lord Mansfield to fend for themselves. The Duke of Devonshire’s carriage was stopped by the mob until he agreed to shout ‘No Popery’. By nightfall the protest had turned into a riot. Thieves and looters joined in as bands of club-wielding rioters burned down foreign chapels and attacked the shops and houses of known Catholics.
At first Georgiana did not realize the danger facing the capital. Her friend Miss Lloyd, she joked, was dreaming about enraged Protestants hammering on her door.
Lord George Gordon’s people continued to make a great fracas, there is a violent mob in Moorfields, and I have learnt that five hundred guards are gone down there. I could not go to the Birthday – my gown was beautiful, a pale blue, with the drapery etc., of an embroider’d gauze in paillons. I am a little comforted for not going by the two messages I have received from Lady Melbourne and the Duke from the Prince of Wales to express his disappointment at having missed dancing with me for the 3rd time.60
But by the next day, 6 June, the mob was on the point of taking over the city. Ministers and opposition alike hurriedly sent their wives and children out of town and prepared to mount a defence of the streets. But the magistrates were nowhere to be seen and, following a misunderstanding over which authority had the power to mandate the use of firearms against civilians, there were no troops in place. The rioting continued unchecked. The mob sacked Newgate Prison and burned down the King’s Bench. They exploded the distilleries at Holborn so that the streets were flooded with spirits and the water supply to Lincoln’s Inn Fields became alcoholic. Lord John Cavendish condemned the Lord Mayor’s cowardice in standing by while London burned to the ground. He had good reason; the mob targeted the houses of prominent Whigs because of the party’s support for religious toleration. Edmund Burke’s house was surrounded but he managed to fend them off. Sir George Savile was less fortunate and narrowly escaped being burnt to death. Poor Lord Mansfield watched as rioters looted his house and destroyed his celebrated library. The Whig grandees mounted a round-the-clock defence of their houses. Georgiana wrote on 7 June, forgetting her birthday in the midst of the chaos:
I shall go to Chiswick tomorrow, for tho’ there could be no kind of danger for me, yet a woman is only troublesome. I hope and think that it will be over tonight as the Council has issued orders that the soldiers may fire … the mob is a strange set, and some of it composed of mere boys. I was very much frightened yesterday, but I keep quiet and preach quiet to everybody. The night before last the Duke was in garrison at Ld Rockingham’s till five, which alarmed me not a little, but now Ld R’s is the safest place, as he has plenty of guards, a justice of peace, a hundred tradesmen arm’d, besides servants and friends.61
Burke persuaded those MPs who had braved the streets to reach parliament not to revoke religious tolerance legislation, even though some sought only to placate the mob. At last, on 8 June, the army arrived and, aided by volunteers that included MPs, barristers, coalheavers and Irish chairmen, organized a well-armed defence. The mob attempted to seize the Bank of England but its defenders, ably led by Captain Holroyd, beat them off. Devonshire House was well guarded and the expected attack never came. By the ninth only pockets of resistance remained. Lord George Gordon gave himself up and was imprisoned in the Tower. Georgiana was badly shaken. ‘I feel mad with spirits at [it] all being over,’ she wrote; ‘it seems now like a dream.’62 She had stayed on the balcony for four nights, staring at the orange sky as Piccadilly reverberated to the sound of gunfire and explosions. The number of people killed or seriously wounded stood at 458; whole blocks of the city lay in ruins.
The immediate aftermath saw the total discrediting of the reformers and all the Association movements. The Whigs were blamed for irresponsibly fomenting discontent ‘Without Doors’ – the term for the world outside parliament. Lord North seized the political advantage and called a snap general election on 1 September. Georgiana’s assistance was demanded from many quarters: in addition to the canvassing she had to do for the Cavendishes in Derby, the Duke’s family pressured her to persuade Lord Spencer to align his interests with theirs. ‘Lord Richard is very anxious for my father to give his interest in Cambridgeshire to Lord Robert Manners, the Duke of Rutland’s brother,’ she told Lady Spencer. ‘I told him I dare say my father would, and they are very anxious as it is of great consequence to have Mr Parker wrote to directly, that he may speak to the tenants as otherwise they might be got by other people.’63 Her brother’s former tutor Sir William Jones, who was contesting the seat for Oxford University, also asked her to write letters on his behalf.
Sheridan wanted to become a politician, but his lack of wealth and family connections made it impossible for him to contest a seat on his own cognizance. His vanity prevented him from making a direct application to the grandees. It suited him far better to approach his target by a more circuitous route, and for this reason he pressed Georgiana to help him. Although she thought it was a shame for him to throw away his literary career, she arranged for him to stand in the Spencer-dominated borough of Stafford. He was duly elected and wrote her a grovelling letter of thanks: ‘I profited by the Permission allow’d to me to make use of your Grace’s letter as my first and best introduction to Lord Spencer’s Interest in the Town … It is no flattery to say that the Duchess of Devonshire’s name commands an implicit admiration wherever it is mentioned.’64 A week later, on 25 September, Charles Fox invited Georgiana to accompany him on the hustings when he contested the borough of Westminster. The press was shocked by her boldness, even though she stood on the platform for only a few minutes. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser made fun of her: she ‘immediately saluted her favourite candidate, the Hon. Charles James Fox. Unfortunately it happened not to be his shaving day; and when the candidate saluted her Grace, it put one in mind of Sheridan’s cunning Isaac, shaking hands with the Graces.’65 Fox was magnificent on the hustings, whipping up his supporters with speeches about parliamentary reform, the rights of the British people and the consequences of royal tyranny. It was on this campaign that he earned his title ‘Man of the People’.
Fox won with a comfortable majority, and his success was unexpectedly duplicated around the country. Despite its recent setbacks, the party had managed to run a well-organized election, clawing back the ground it had lost following the Gordon Riots. North’s majority was much reduced; on paper it was only 28, and he would have to rely on the independent MPs to give their support. The Whigs’ success was all the more remarkable because they had funded their campaign out of their own pockets while North had almost unlimited funds from the treasury. The nearparity of numbers convinced them that it would be only a matter of time before the government collapsed.
* Georgiana had learned the importance of ‘mixing’ from her first days of married life when the Duke had sent her off to Derby to foster good relations with the local voters. She also knew, without the Cavendishes having to tell her, that her behaviour had political implications. The year before at Brighton she wrote, ‘we are very popular here from mixing so much with the people, for Lady Sefton and Mrs Meynel never mixed with the people till we came.’
* I cannot feel at ease.
*Educated opinion excoriated the doctor as a charlatan and his patients as pathetic gullibles, but this did not prevent the credulous from seeking his help. Infertile couples paid an exorbitant £50 a night to make love on the ‘electro-magnetic bed’ in his ‘celestial chamber’ to the strains of an orchestra playing outside, while a pressure-cylinder pumped ‘magnetic fire’ into the room. It was also recommended that they drink from Graham’s patented elixir, costing a guinea a bottle. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser ran a successful campaign against Graham, pillorying both him and his clients and eventually he went bankrupt in 1782.
5Introduction to Politics 1780–1782
The concourse of Nobility, etc., at the Duchess of Devonshire’s on Thursday night were so great, that it was eight o’clock yesterday morning before they all took leave. Upwards of 500 sat down to supper, and near 1000 came agreeable to invitation; and so numerous were the servants, that no less than 3500 tickets were delivered out, which entitled each of them to a pot of porter. The company consisted of the most fashionable ‘characters’. With respect to the ladies, the dresses were for the prevailing part, white … The best dressed ladies were her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cumberland, her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Duncannon, Lady Althorpe, Lady Waldegrave, and Lady Harrington … The gentlemen best dressed were his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the Marquis of Graham, and the Hon. Charles Fox.
London Chronicle, 21–23 March 1782
We hear the amiable Duchess of Devonshire is about to propose and promote a subscription among her female friends for building a fifty gun ship, in imitation of the Ladies in France who set the laudable example at the beginning of the war.
Morning Post, 21 September 1782
LORD NORTH clung to office despite the government’s poor showing in the election. Exasperated, the Whigs consoled themselves by fêting the Prince of Wales, who amused them by being rude about his father. He took great delight in annoying his parents; at the ball to mark his official presentation to society on 18 January 1781 he snubbed the ladies of the court by dancing all night with Georgiana. The Morning Herald could not help remarking, ‘The Court beauties looked with an eye of envy on her Grace of Devonshire, as the only woman honoured with the hand of the heir apparent, during Thursday night’s ball at St James’s.’1
Much against her inclination, Georgiana left London just as the new parliament was getting under way. In February she accompanied the Duke to Hardwick, in the words of a friend, ‘pour faire un enfant’.2* Lady Clermont had paid the Devonshires a visit while little Charlotte was still new to the household and was pleasantly surprised. ‘I never saw anything so charming as [Georgiana] has been,’ she wrote to Lady Spencer, ‘her fondness for the Duke, and his not being ashamed of expressing his for her.’3 But relations between them had deteriorated rapidly after Harriet’s marriage to Lord Duncannon in November. To Georgiana’s embarrassment, her sister delighted the Cavendishes by becoming pregnant at once. Despite Harriet’s initial reservations her marriage appeared to be free of the tensions which plagued Georgiana’s. In February 1781 Lady Spencer wrote to inform Georgiana that Harriet’s ‘closet is becoming a vrai bijou, and she and her husband pass many comfortable hours in it. I trust indeed that all will go very well in that quarter.’4
Harriet’s good fortune contributed to Georgiana’s fear that her own failure to produce a baby was a punishment from God.5 ‘I will not hear you give way to disappointment so much,’ chided Lady Spencer. ‘If you were of my age there would be some reason why you should suppose you would never have children, but as it is there is no reason why you should give it up.’6 Sitting alone in cheerless Hardwick every day while the Duke went out hunting, Georgiana saw every reason why she should. The empty, silent afternoons were too much for her to bear and she blotted out her days with large doses of opiates. ‘I took something today,’ she wrote, ‘but I shall ride tomorrow.’7
The Duke was disgusted when Georgiana still showed no sign of pregnancy after a month at Hardwick. Deciding that their stay was a waste of time, he gave orders for Devonshire House to be prepared for their imminent arrival. After their return Georgiana rarely appeared in public. The papers remarked that she had ‘become the gravest creature in the world’ and complained about her absence from society.8 On 24 March she appeared briefly at the King’s Theatre to support the dancer Vestris, an Italian immigrant and one of the most famous dancers of the time. He was performing a new dance which he and Georgiana had invented together during a private lesson at Devonshire House. Nine hundred people filled the theatre. ‘We were in the greatest impatience for the Duchess of Devonshire’s arrival,’ reported the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, ‘and our eager eyes were roaming about in search of her. We spied her Grace at last sitting in her box … alas! We soon found out, that her Grace was only there to pay a kind of public visit to the Vestris, for the Devonshire minuet, which was received with very warm applause, and was no sooner over than the Duchess disappeared.’9
The reason for Georgiana’s sudden retirement was not only the disappointment of Hardwick but a crisis concerning Harriet. Less than two months after Lady Spencer had written of the Duncannons’ ‘comfortable hours’ together Lord Duncannon shocked them all by shouting at Harriet in public. Questioned afterwards, Harriet confessed that she was frightened to be alone with him, since the slightest provocation made him lose his self-control. The Cavendishes regarded Duncannon’s abusiveness towards his wife as a disgrace to the entire family. Another incident at a ball in April moved his cousin, the Duke’s sister the Duchess of Portland, to write him a warning:
You say I did you great injury by exposing you publicly to all the room – You exposed yourself, and I am concerned to say I have too often seen you do the same before … when you left the room, there was not any of the company present ( your father in particular) who did not applaud my conduct, and censure yours in the strongest terms possible … Indeed, the very first evening that you came to me after that conversation, the night of the Ridotto, I never felt more ashamed or hurt than I did for you, and I must tell you that your Behaviour did not escape the notice of the Company who heard it as well as myself with astonishment. The cards were going to your mind, nothing had happened to put you out of humour, but upon Lady Duncannon’s coming into the Room, as I thought very properly dressed, your temper was immediately ruffled because she had put on her diamonds, (a consideration I should not have thought worthy of the mind of a man). Indeed such sort of behaviour in a man is so perfectly new that I do not know how to account for it or reason upon it. You are very young and have had very little experience … The World in general was inclined to think well of you. Your friends and relations thought you were all their hearts could have wished, but do not flatter yourself that your conduct has escaped observation. It is becoming the subject of ridicule, and your best Friends begin to fear your want of understanding.10
Lord Duncannon apologized; his behaviour, he explained, was caused by worry over Harriet’s pregnancy: he feared that she would miscarry like Georgiana. The Duchess of Portland’s reply showed her contempt: ‘the frequent agitations that I have perceived your conduct to occasion her may have been the cause of this unhappy event. I trust in God she will recover [from] this, and that it will hereafter be uppermost in your mind to reward her affection for you with that confidence which she so well deserves.’11 Threats and warnings were the only weapons available to the Spencers or the Cavendishes. Eighteenth-century law granted a husband the freedom to treat his wife as he pleased, except in the case of imprisonment and physical torture. Even then, the shame of public scandal deterred upper-class women from seeking legal redress in all but the most extreme circumstances.*
Georgiana had ceased to entertain at Devonshire House immediately after the discovery and spent her time caring for Harriet. The Spencers were frightened to leave their daughter alone with Duncannon when she was so vulnerable. They kept her away from him as much as they could until she gave birth to a son, the Hon. John William Ponsonby, on 31 August 1781. Not long afterwards Lord Spencer became deaf and suffered a partial paralysis on one side of his body. The double anxiety over Harriet and Lord Spencer drove Georgiana to the gaming tables, and Lady Spencer with her. ‘I can never make myself easy about the bad example I have set you and which you have but too faithfully imitated,’ Lady Spencer had written bitterly in November 1779.12 Now she found herself writing again: she had committed ‘twenty enormities which oblige me to conclude my letter with the usual charge that you must attend more to what I say than what I do’.13 Harriet followed her mother and sister, but with less than a tenth of their income, and without the resources to pay her creditors.
George Selwyn described incredible scenes at Devonshire House to Lord Carlisle. ‘The trade or amusement which engrosses everybody who lives in what is called the pleasurable world is [faro],’ he wrote. Georgiana had arranged the drawing room to resemble a professional gaming house, complete with hired croupiers and a commercial faro bank. Lady Spencer was there most nights, throwing her rings on to the table when she had run out of money:
poor Mr Grady is worn out in being kept up at one Lady’s house or another till six in the morning. Among these, Lady Spencer and her daughter, the Duchess of D. and Lady Harcourt are the chief punters. Hare, Charles [Fox], and Richard [Fitzpatrick] held a bank the whole night and a good part of the next day … by turns, each of the triumvirate punting when he is himself a dealer. There is generally two or three thousands lying on the table in rouleaus till about noon, but who they belong to, or will belong to, the Lord knows.14
Faro was a complicated game, involving one banker and an unlimited number of players who staked their bets upon the dealer turning over particular combinations of cards. Although it was a game of chance, the odds in favour of the banker were second only to those in roulette. It was first played in resort towns such as Tunbridge Wells, but in fifty years it had become the most popular game in high society. Women were said to be particularly addicted to it, but it was also the favourite of Charles Fox. Georgiana set a new trend by illegally charging farodealers fifty guineas a night for the right to set up tables in her house.*15 But she relied on professionals of questionable honesty to run the farotable and bank, and Selwyn complained of underhand dealings ‘at Devonshire House … Charles [Fox] says, he is not allowed to take money from the bank; he means for the payment of debts, but yet I hear some are paid, such as O’Kelly and other blacklegs.’ The carelessness with which people threw their money about attracted shady characters to the house. One in particular, a man called Martindale, lured Georgiana into a ruinous agreement. According to Sheridan, ‘the Duchess and Martindale had agreed that whatever the two won from each other should be sometimes double, sometimes treble the sum which it was called … the Duchess … was literally sobbing at her losses – she perhaps having lost £1500, when it was supposed to be £500.’16
Lady Mary Coke told her relations in Scotland that the Duchess of Devonshire was living a twenty-four-hour day of gambling and amusement. Last week, she wrote, Georgiana had attended a breakfast at Wimbledon (which continued all day), then an assembly at Lady Hertford’s, where she had proposed a visit to Vauxhall Gardens. She took all the Duchesses, sniffed Lady Mary, as well as the most popular men, including Lord Egremont and Thomas Grenville, ‘a professed admirer of the Duchess of Devonshire for two years past’. There they stayed until the small hours, keeping the musicians at their posts long after the gardens were officially closed. She did the same thing the next day and the day after that until, returning from another late party at Vauxhall with the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Melbourne, Lord Egremont and Thomas Grenville, she fell asleep in the boat.17
The newspapers also reported on Georgiana’s activities to the wider world, but she was still their darling. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser increased its coverage of her to almost an item a week. On 11 June it proudly reported having seen ‘the Duchess of Devonshire, with a smart cocked hat, scarlet riding habit and a man’s domino, [who] looked divinely’.18 In July it informed readers that Georgiana was sitting for Gainsborough for a full-length portrait intended as a present to the Queen of France. It continued to follow her progress after the end of the season, when she and the Duke accompanied the Derbyshire militia to the military camp on the Roxborough Downs, near Plymouth.
On 6 September 1781 the French fleet once again appeared in the Channel, but for the press the event paled in comparison to Georgiana’s launch of HMS Anson: she christened the ship in front of a delirious crowd of several thousand who had streamed into the port for the day.19 When the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, contemporaries of the Devonshires, came for a visit the press invented a rift between the two women, calling them ‘the rival and beautiful Duchesses’. Georgiana had become so famous that her name was enough to make anything fashionable. The entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood understood the principles of selling better than any manufacturer in the country: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common stile [sic] ’till authoris’d by their betters – by the Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’20 To entice the middle classes to buy his china sets he named them after royalty and famous aristocratic families. ‘They want a name – a name has a wonderful effect I assure you,’ he told his partner. ‘Suppose you present the Duchess of Devonshire with a Set and beg leave to call them Devonshire flowerpots.’21
The Morning Herald’s love affair with Georgiana showed no signs of tiring. In December it stated that ‘her heart, notwithstanding her exalted situation, appears to be directed by the most liberal principles; and from the benevolence and gentleness which marks her conduct, the voice of compliment becomes the offering of gratitude.’22 These fawning notices revealed more than just a weakness for society hostesses. A recent upturn in the Whig party’s fortunes made the paper eager to be associated with the future regime. The war looked certain to end: General Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown to the combined forces of the French and the Americans, under the leadership of the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington. When Lord North heard the news he threw back his arms and cried, ‘Oh God. It is all over.’23 He offered his resignation to the King without delay, but after five years of war George III could not accept the defeat. He ordered the Prime Minister to remain in office and to prepare a counter attack.
The Whigs felt certain that they would soon be in power. Impatient for North to go, they harassed him in the Commons by relentlessly proposing motions of no confidence against the government. ‘We expect a good division tomorrow,’ Georgiana wrote on 26 February 1782.24 The following day they won a resounding victory in a motion calling for an end to hostilities against America. Driven by his implacable master, North limped on until 20 March, when at last the King accepted that the ministry had lost the confidence of the House and could not continue. George Selwyn told Lord Carlisle that the report of North’s resignation had spread to all the coffee houses within hours.25
George III refused to accept the Whigs en masse and insisted on a joint ministry between Lord Rockingham and the Earl of Shelburne, the leader of the old Chathamite faction whose sympathies lay more with the King than with the Whigs. The party accepted this bitter pill, hoping it might eventually be able to push Shelburne out. Having agreed the terms, the Whigs went to Devonshire House to celebrate. ‘I was at Devonshire House till about 4,’ wrote Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, ‘and then left most of the company there. All the new supposed Ministers were there except Lord Rockingham, who had probably other business, and perhaps with the King.’26 Georgiana threw a series of celebratory balls, each one lasting the whole night and part of the following day. The furniture downstairs was cleared out to make room for the crowds and the ceilings decorated with thick festoons of roses. Keeping the ten Van Dycks in the hall, Georgiana transformed all the other rooms into a fantasy with painted scenery and strategically hung mirrors. Public excitement about the balls grew, and on one night the managers of the Opera House shortened the last act to enable the Prince of Wales to leave on time. The next day the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, which had devoted several columns to the Devonshire ‘galas’, reported, ‘none was ever more admired than the minuets at the Devonshire Gala, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire in particular’.27
Having so long avoided St James’s, the Whigs now trooped into court to pay their respects. The King was too disgusted to hold a proper Drawing Room and sat glumly next to Queen Charlotte, while Georgiana and her friends made polite conversation with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland.28 Tradition demanded that the King recognize the new ministers with the awards of office, and he grudgingly offered the garter to senior Whigs. They accepted with a shameless delight which disgusted Nathaniel Wraxall. He watched with embarrassment as ‘The Duke of Devonshire … advanced up to the Sovereign, with his phlegmatic, cold, awkward air, like a clown. Lord Shelburne came forward, bowing on every side, smiling and fawning like a courtier.’ Only the Duke of Richmond, in his opinion, ‘presented himself, easy, unembarrassed and with dignity as a gentleman’.29
Fox approached Georgiana during the celebrations and made her a proposal. He was now Foreign Secretary, and under parliamentary rules MPs selected for office had to re-offer themselves to their constituents. Having been impressed by the crowd’s reaction to Georgiana’s appearance on the hustings at Covent Garden in 1780, Fox asked her to repeat her performance, only this time with more fanfare. She accepted without hesitation. The Duke and other grandees agreed to the proposal and allowed her to participate in discussions on how to plan the event. They decided that Georgiana should lead a women’s delegation. Since the crowds had responded so enthusiastically to one woman on the platform, they reasoned that five or six would be even more popular.
On 3 April Georgiana performed her first official duty for the party. The diarist Silas Neville was enjoying a stroll when he stumbled on the proceedings: ‘[I] was present in the Garden at the re-election of the Arch-Patriot Secretary. The Crowd was immense of carriages and people of all ranks. The Duchess of Devonshire and another lady were on the hustings and waved their hats with the rest in compliment to Charles, who was soon after chaired under a canopy of oak leaves and mirtle amidst the acclamations of thousands.’30 The London Chronicle reported the event in some amazement. In an age of free beer and bloody noses at election time the Whigs’ polished handling of public events was disconcerting. Fox stood on a platform beneath three large banners that read, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE, FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE, and INDEPENDENCE. Shouting above the roaring crowd, Fox thanked them for their confidence and promised he would unite the country in defence of liberty. ‘His friends wore orange and blue ribbons, with the word Fox on them,’ reported the paper.31 Georgiana was there with several other women, all wearing the Whig colours of blue and buff, and they raised their hats each time the crowd huzzahed. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed before. Milliners’ shops began making fans bearing Georgiana’s portrait which sold in their hundreds; Charles Fox and the Prince of Wales also became fashionable subjects: ‘The fans are quite new, and beautiful, designed and executed by the first masters of that art, and are striking likenesses of the exalted characters they represent; the prices are very moderate,’ claimed Hartshorn and Dyde’s of Wigmore Street.32
A week later, on 8 April, the Whigs made their first appearance in the Commons. At first MPs were disorientated: Lord North and his followers were no longer sitting on the treasury benches; in their place were the Whigs. Their uniform of blue and buff was gone and they wore the formal dress of government, all of them – even Fox – with hair powder, ruffles, lace around their necks, and swords by their sides. Lord Nugent had been burgled the night before and his lace ruffles stolen, causing a wag to remark that magistrates would probably find them on the new government.33
Lady Spencer, trapped at home with the ailing Lord Spencer, felt excluded from her children’s lives. The drum beat which accompanied Georgiana’s activities barely sounded in Wimbledon. On 22 May she recalled a recent conversation with the Duchess of Annenberg who had congratulated her on the family’s reputation for being one of the ‘happiest and closest’ in Britain.34 But Georgiana paid no attention to her mother’s hints; for the first time since her wedding in 1774 she looked forward to the future. According to James Hare, she appeared ‘very handsome and seems easier and happier than she used to do’.35
Georgiana’s optimism was born out of a new-found sense of purpose. In September 1782 she recorded her thoughts about the year.
The secret springs of events are seldom known [she wrote]. But when they are, they become particularly instructive and entertaining … the greatest actions have often proceeded from the intrigues of a handsome woman or a fashionable man, and of course whilst the memoires of those events are instructive by opening the secret workings of the human mind, they likewise attract by the interest and events of a novel … If some people would write down the events they had been witness to … the meaning of an age would be transmitted to the next with clearness and dependence – to the idle reader it would present an interesting picture of the manners of his country … I wish I had done this – I came into the world at 17 and I am now five and twenty – in these eight years I have been in the midst of action … I have seen partys rise and fall – friends be united and disunited – the ties of love give way to caprice, to interest, and to vanity …’
She hoped one day to be ‘a faithful historian of the secret history of the times’.36
* To make a baby.
* The patriarchal right to ‘discipline and punnish’ a wife was not in question. If there was any doubt, a judge’s verdict on a case in 1782 resolved the issue. He declared that, if there was a good cause, a husband could legally beat his wife so long as the stick was no thicker than his thumb. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce (Oxford 1990), p. 201.
*In 1797 Lady Buckinghamshire and Lady Elizabeth Luttrell were actually arrested and fined £50 each for running a gambling concern with a faro-banker in Lady Buckinghamshire’s house.
PART TWO Politics
6The Cuckoo Bird1782–1783
The Duchess of Devonshire, it is said, means to introduce a head piece which is to be neither hat, cap, nor bonnet, and yet all three, a sort of trinity in unity, under the appellation the ‘Devonshire Whim’. Whenever the Duchess of Devonshire visits the capital, a Standard may be expected to be given to the Fashion. At present scarce any innovation is attempted even in the head-dress. This does not arise from the Town being destitute of Women of elegance; many ladies of the first rank being on the spot; but rather proceeds from the dread each feels that the Taste she may endeavour to take the lead in may be rejected.
Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 21 October 1782
As SOON AS parliament adjourned for the summer Georgiana and the Duke retreated to Bath. They did not return to Devonshire House until the autumn, when the new session was well under way. Accompanying them to London was Lady Elizabeth Foster, described by the papers as the ‘Duchess of Devonshire’s intimate friend’.
Georgiana met Elizabeth, or Bess, as she affectionately called her, during their first week at Bath. The Duke had rented the Duke of Marlborough’s house, one of the finest in town, for the whole summer. The Devonshires were both there to ‘take the cure’: the Duke for his gout, Georgiana for her ‘infertility’ – she had suffered two early miscarriages the previous year.1 The tone of her letters betrays her misery at having to abandon London just when the Whigs had come to power. She rarely went out and attended few of the balls and nightly concerts in the Assembly Rooms. Twice a day she drank the thermal waters in the King’s Bath, the most fashionable of the three pump rooms. The company there was hardly uplifting, comprising the unfortunate casualties of eighteenth-century living: the incurables, the rheumatics, the gout sufferers, and those afflicted with rampant eczema and other unsightly skin diseases. Georgiana sat each morning in a semicircle near the bar with the other childless wives, cup and saucer in either hand, listening to a band of provincial musicians. Bath was, in her opinion, ‘amazingly disagreeable, I am only surprised at the Duke bearing it all as well as he does, but he is so good natur’d he bears anything well’.2
Two things made life tolerable: watching the new Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons at the Theatre Royal, and the acquaintance of two sisters living in straitened circumstances in an unfashionable part of town. On 1 June Georgiana informed Lady Spencer, ‘Lady Erne and Lady E. Foster are our chief support or else it would be shockingly dull for the D. indeed.’3 These were the eldest daughters of the Earl of Bristol; Lady Mary Erne was a great friend of Mary Graham, who was probably responsible for the sisters’ introduction to Georgiana. Both were separated from their husbands, and lived with their aunt, a Methodist convert, on the tiny income allocated to them by their father.
Georgiana’s letters to her mother were full of praise for her new friends: ‘You cannot conceive how agreeable and amiable they are, and I never knew people who have more wit and good nature.’4 But after a short time there was no more mention of Lady Mary Erne, and Lady Elizabeth Foster – Bess – became the sole topic of her correspondence. She was the same age as Georgiana and already the mother of two sons, yet there was something surprisingly girlish about her. Physically, she was the opposite of Georgiana: slimmer, shorter, more delicate, with thin dark hair framing her tiny face. Her appearance of frailty, coupled with a feminine helplessness and coquettish charm, made most men want to protect and possess her. The historian Edward Gibbon, who had known Bess since she was a little girl, described her manners as the most seductive of any woman he knew. ‘No man could withstand her,’ was his opinion. ‘If she chose to beckon the Lord Chancellor from his Woolsack in full sight of the world, he could not resist obedience.’5
Bess’s family, the Herveys, were not the sort that recommended themselves to Lady Spencer. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is alleged to have said: ‘When God created the human race, he created men, women, and Herveys.’* The quip could apply to each generation: eccentric, libertine and untrustworthy, the Herveys were an extraordinary family who had made their fortune in the early eighteenth century as professional courtiers. Bess’s father, the fourth Earl of Bristol, had succeeded unexpectedly to the title on the death of his two elder brothers without legitimate heirs.† He took the well-worn path to a career in the Church, eventually becoming the Bishop of Derry, which brought him a modest salary. But the Earl-Bishop’s spendthrift habits meant that Bess, her brother and two sisters were brought up in relative poverty. He had two great passions: one was for art, and the other a morbid fascination with human misery. He was constantly rushing to the scene of wars, riots and natural disasters. The family spent years roaming the Continent from one terrible situation to another while he searched for antiquities and objets d’art along the way.
On succeeding to the title in 1779 Bess’s father inherited Ickworth Park in Suffolk, and with it an income of £20,000 a year.6 Immediately he embarked on a grandiose building scheme to house his planned art collection. But the Earl-Bishop’s good fortune had come too late for his daughters, especially for Bess. She had married in 1776 while still Miss Elizabeth Hervey, a mere bishop’s daughter with no dowry and few acquaintances. Her husband, John Thomas Foster, was a family friend and a member of the Irish parliament. At the time general opinion congratulated Bess on her advantageous match. Foster was careful with money, serious (if a little humourless), and uninterested in city life. Later Bess claimed she had married him under duress: ‘I really did on my knees ask not to marry Mr F. and said his character terrified me, and they both have since said it was their doing my being married to him,’ she told Georgiana.7 However, her parents’ letters suggest a different story – a love match between a respectable squire and a young bride impatient for her own establishment. ‘I like the young man better than ever,’ the Earl-Bishop told his daughter Mary, ‘and think him peculiarly suited to her.’8
Whatever the truth, by 1780 the marriage was in jeopardy. Bess’s father, who was busy supervising his building works, ordered his wife to bring the couple to heel. Bess was pregnant with her second child and the two were at Ickworth, bickering constantly. Lady Bristol obeyed reluctantly, complaining to Lady Mary, ‘With regard to the reconciliation, I do not think there is a ray of comfort or hope in it. It was totally against my opinion as to happiness, but your Father’s orders and her situation call’d for it … dejection and despair are wrote on her countenance, and tho’ I have no doubt that time might wear out her attachment, I believe nothing can remove her disgust … I have no hope of getting rid of him …’ She was also furious with her husband, whose sole motive in seeking a reconciliation was to avoid paying for his daughter’s upkeep: ‘For his part I am convinced that he is perfectly well pleased – affection, vanity and avarice being all gratified.’9 Lady Bristol does not name the object of Bess’s ‘attachment’ but he was clearly not Mr Foster, for whom Bess felt ‘disgust’.
In public the Herveys blamed the breakdown of the marriage on Mr Foster, who had seduced Bess’s maid. This was obviously a factor in Bess’s dislike. Nevertheless, she was willing to attempt a reconciliation, if only for the sake of her own two children, and was shocked when Foster demanded a complete separation. He ordered her to surrender their child and the infant as soon as it was weaned, refusing to pay a penny towards her support. The first act was legal in the eighteenth century as the father always had custody of his children, but the second was not under normal circumstances. Unless legally separated or divorced, a husband was liable for his wife’s debts and most families ensured that marriage contracts contained provisions for their daughters if there was a separation. Either Bess’s family had failed to do so, or Mr Foster had evidence of his wife’s adultery and threatened to divorce her if provoked.
In November 1781 Mrs Dillon, a distant relation of the Herveys, visited Ickworth and was appalled by Lord Bristol’s callousness: ‘Lady Elizabeth Foster has the most pleasing manner in the world. She is just at this moment in the most terrible situation. Her odious husband will settle so little on her that she must be dependent on her father, which is always an unpleasant thing. Her children, who are now here, are to be taken from her. All this makes her miserable … [Lord Bristol] has not taken his seat, nor will he let Lady Bristol go to Court or to town.’10 The Earl was shortly to abandon his family in England and resume his jaunts across Europe. In 1782 he rented out their London house and locked his wife out of her rooms at Ickworth.
Never was a story more proper for a novel than poor Lady Elizabeth Foster’s [wrote Mrs Dillon]. She is parted from her husband, but would you conceive any father with the income he has should talk of her living alone on such a scanty pittance as £300 a year! And this is the man who is ever talking of his love of hospitality and his desire to have his children about him! Might one not imagine that he would be oppos’d to a pretty young woman of her age living alone? It is incredible the cruelties that monster Foster made her undergo with him; her father knows it, owned him a villain, and yet, for fear she should fall on his hands again, tried first to persuade her to return to him.11
To compound matters, the Earl managed to ‘forget’ Bess’s allowance whenever it came due.
Mrs Dillon’s horror at Bess’s situation – respectable but alone and without financial support – was understandable. Fanny Burney wrote The Wanderer to highlight the dreadful vulnerability of such women to pimps and exploitation. Their status demanded that appearances they could not afford should be maintained while the means to make an independent living were denied them. Bess’s newly inherited title made it impossible for her to find work either as a governess or a paid companion.12 She could easily fall for a man who offered her a better life as his mistress, hence Mrs Dillon’s amazement at Lord Bristol’s lack of concern. Many years later Bess tried to defend her subsequent conduct to her son:
Pray remember, when you say that my enthusiasm has had a fair and well-shaped channel, that I was younger than you when I was without a guide; a wife and no husband, a mother and no children … by myself alone to steer through every peril that surrounds a young woman so situated; books, the arts, and a wish to be loved and approved … a proud determination to be my own letter of recommendation … with perhaps a manner that pleased, realised my projects, and gained me friends wherever I have been.13
A wish to be loved and approved, and a manner that pleased: it was an irresistible combination to Georgiana. Bess’s desire to serve her new friend was greater than anything Georgiana had ever encountered before. Both the Devonshires were also deeply moved by her misfortunes. ‘If you see Lady Bristol,’ wrote Georgiana to her mother, ‘I wish you would say as from yourself that the D and I are very happy in seeing a great deal of Lady Erne and Lady Eliz., for that strange man Lord Bristol is, I have a notion, acting the strangest of parts by Lady Eliz and we thought perhaps if it was known we saw something of them it might make him ashamed of not doing something for her.’14
It never occurred to Georgiana that Bess’s untiring enthusiasm for her company might be inspired by her own poverty. The idea that her generosity made Bess a de facto paid companion never entered her mind. Bess was good with the Duke, too; indeed he appeared to like her almost as much, and Georgiana congratulated herself on discovering such a perfect friend. Bess realized that both Georgiana and the Duke were lonely – Georgiana obviously so, but the Duke suffered no less in his own way. Since Charlotte Spencer’s death he had been without steady female companionship. Georgiana was too caught up in her own life, and too much in awe of him to take the place of Charlotte. Bess could see that they both needed a confidante, a role that she was very happy to play, although it required her to act two quite different parts: with the Duke she was submissive and flirtatious; with Georgiana she was passionate and sensitive. Almost everyone except the Devonshires saw through Bess immediately. Much later James Hare gently tried to explain to Georgiana what all their friends had thought for many years. ‘I agree with you in every word you say of Ly Elizabeth, there cannot be a warmer, steadier, more disinterested friend: [but] she shews, perhaps, too great a distrust in her natural graces, for I never will be brought to say that she is not affected, tho’ I allow it is the most pardonable sort of affectation I ever met with, and is become quite natural.’15
The seventh of June was Georgiana’s twenty-fifth birthday and Lady Spencer used the occasion to denounce her daughter’s mode of living. ‘In your dangerous path of life you have almost unavoidably amassed a great deal of useless trash – gathered weeds instead of flowers,’ she wrote sternly. ‘You live so constantly in public you cannot live for your own soul.’16 The harshness of the letter stunned Georgiana, who replied that on her ‘nervous days’ she cried whenever she thought about it: ‘When the 7th of June gave you a Daughter, wild, unworthy, careless as she is, and of course, a cause of many fears, many troubles to you, yet it gave her to you, with a heart that longs and dares too, to think it shall make it up to you.’17 The following week she repeated her promise, pleading, ‘I could write it in my blood Dearest M.’18
Feeling hurt and rejected, Georgiana turned to the sympathetic and understanding Bess for comfort. She could confide in her new friend as she had done with Mary Graham, and without any of the inconvenience – Bess had no husband or home to call her away; there was no question of them being parted. The news that Bess had accompanied Georgiana and the Duke to Plympton camp for the annual military review alarmed Lady Spencer. She had no illusions about Bess, but she was astonished that both Georgiana and the Duke had fallen under her spell. She gathered from her daughter’s letters that the three were inseparable, sharing Plympton House together, passing their evenings reading Shakespeare aloud. Bess never seemed to leave Georgiana alone, nor was there any facet of Georgiana’s life closed off to her. Little realizing its bad effect, Bess wrote on Georgiana’s letters to Lady Spencer, addressing her as if she were an old friend and adding postscripts about her daughter’s health and good behaviour. Sometimes she wrote almost the whole body of the letter on the excuse that her friend was too tired to write. She was always deferential, but her familiarity with Georgiana grated on Lady Spencer. Her tone revealed a person desperate to make a permanent home for herself.
The harmonious threesome remained at Plympton until the end of September, when Bess developed a bad cough. Georgiana complained she was being very annoying, loudly insisting one minute that she was perfectly all right, and the next admitting to a troublesome cough for the past two years, ‘tho’ she considers all this very ridiculous, and says she is only a little nervous’.19 Georgiana became anxious and full of self-doubt. On 30 September she wrote, ‘I did not go out as I was sulky and uneasy and locked myself up all morning.’20 She admitted she was taking sedatives again which made her groggy and prevented her from receiving friends.21
Georgiana blamed her unhappiness on her infertility.
You accepted Zyllia [she wrote to Lady Spencer, referring to a play she had written about a girl who discovers that her best friend is her mother], and therefore I am going to open the foolish nonsense of my heart, to my friend – I am discontented with myself – I feel a sentiment something like uneasiness and envy at the accounts I receive of Lady George [Cavendish] and her grossesse. I did not mind it at all at first, but now that it draws near its event I feel a sensation at it that I hate myself for, and yet nobody can form more sincere and heartfelt vows than I do for her well-being – I should not feel this if it did not appear to me that there was a possibility of my being so, I am convinc’d could I master the lying in bed, could I lead a strengthening kind of life, and have a calm heart and mind for some time together that it would succeed – and strong as my wishes and persuasions are, so weak am I that I yield to things that hurt me, with my eyes open – you must direct and save me Dst M, for you only can.22
There were other worries: her debts for one. On 19 October Lady Spencer told her that she had paid some money on her behalf to a Mr Hicks, who had seemed quite shifty.
In short [she wrote, somewhat alarmed by the meeting], I suspect some mischief or other - that you have bespoke more things than you can possibly pay for and have given him things of value in exchange. If this is the case I wish you would let me enquire into the particulars, for I am afraid you are often much impos’d upon – at all events I beg you will never part with Jewells. I have often told you they are not your own and should be look’d upon as things only entrusted to your care – do not pass over this article without answering.23
Georgiana was, as usual, mired in debt, but it was not the only reason for her distress. The envy she felt towards Lady George had a much closer object.
The ease with which Bess had made herself the centre of attention during her illness had been a revelation to Georgiana. She deeply resented the Duke’s behaviour over her and had suffered pangs of jealousy when he earnestly discussed Bess’s health with the doctors. Conveniently, Georgiana then fell ill herself. It had the desired effect of turning Bess’s attention back to her and she wrote contentedly, ‘I was bad with my head but as I have already told you, I was so well nursed by the Duke and Ly Eliz that there was quite a comfort in being ill.’24 The crisis was over, and Bess was once more her special friend. Yet she was unable to rid herself of the suspicion that Bess was not quite all that she seemed. She tried to explain her feelings to Lady Spencer in a long letter on 29 October:
You will not suspect me of overdeep penetration, but I very often have, more than you would imagine, amus’d myself with observing the characters of those around me. I do not know if this is a good occupation, it is not least a negative one for it does neither good nor harm to myself or anybody else. It has happened to me with people who have influence over me, to have perfectly seized the reason of their wishing me to do some one thing or other which I did not like to do, and that tho’ they did not disclose their real motive, I have been saying to myself all the time they have been persuading me, ‘I know what you are at and why you wish me to do so and so,’ and yet with this full conviction, instead of owning it and inspite of disliking the thing, I have done it because I was desired and have pretended to believe every word that was said to me, so that I actually have taken more pains to appear a Dupe than most people do, to show they cannot be outwitted. In things of consequence I hope I should be stronger, but in common events I have so great an antipathy to the word no that I expose myself to many inconveniences not to pronounce it. It seems almost as if the activity of my nature spent itself in my mind, and gave me force to feel and reason, but that tir’d with the effort it yielded to indolence the moment I was to perform.25
Lady Spencer gave no sign that she understood Georgiana’s cry, and in her reply merely agreed, ‘your stopping short of acting so, must be an effect of Indolence and will I hope with a little time be got the better of’.26 It was only many years later, when suffering forced her to acknowledge things she would ordinarily have buried, that Lady Spencer accepted she might have been responsible for fostering a certain weakness in Georgiana’s character. ‘I cannot deceive myself,’ she wrote sadly, ‘that to that easiness of temper and fear of giving pain which they both (the Duchess especially) inherit from me they owe the want of that persevering resolution which would have led them into much good and away from much evil.’27 All Lady Spencer could see in 1782, however, was an interloper who was stealing her own rightful place in Georgiana’s heart. She complained about Bess’s influence:
Those were happy days, my dearest child, when every thought of your innocent heart came rushing out without a wish to disguise it, when my eternal rummages were born with perfect composure without any previous precautions and no little drawers or portefeuille were reserved … I see you on the edge of a thousand precipices, in danger of losing the confidence of those who are dearest to you … I see you running with eagerness to those – must I miscall them friends? – Who tho’ their intentions may not be wrong, are by constantly talking to you on subjects which are always better avoided becoming imperceptibly your most hurtful enemies, all these and more keep me on the rack.28
Lady Spencer spent much of her time thinking up ways to get rid of her rival. She asked Georgiana and the Duke to visit them at Hotwells in Bristol, politely adding that Bess would not be welcome since Lord Spencer was ‘too ill to see a stranger with any comfort’.29 Bess was bitterly disappointed to be called a stranger after all her carefully composed postscripts. ‘Poor little Bess’, as she styled herself, went into hysterics at the thought of being left alone and whipped up the Devonshires into an equally distraught state. Georgiana hurriedly wrote to her mother, ‘Lady Eliz. comes with us, Dst Mama, and poor little soul, it is impossible it should be otherwise.’ She tried to soften the blow by pointing to Bess’s obedient nature: ‘My father need not mind her in the least, she is the quietest little thing and will sit and draw in a corner of the room, or be sent out of the room, or do whatever you please.’30 She ended the letter with the only sentence that brought comfort to Lady Spencer: ‘I hope to see her set out for Nice within the month.’
The two weeks in Bristol were strained and awkward for everyone except Bess. If she was aware of the tensions around her, she gave no sign of it: her smile never dropped and her eagerness to oblige never flagged. Lady Spencer, however, noticed that she ate very little; it almost appeared as if she were deliberately starving herself. Nearly every morning the Duke and Bess left Georgiana with her to go riding together; they returned before supper and joined the group, playing cards or reading, without looking or glancing at each other again. Their behaviour was suspicious enough for anyone to question their relationship, but Georgiana chose to remain ignorant. In only a short space of time she had become so dependent on Bess that the possibility of losing her devotion was too painful to contemplate.
The Duke left after ten days and Bess remained in Bristol with Georgiana and Lady Spencer. His departure enabled Lady Spencer to examine Bess’s relationship with her daughter. When the Duke was not present she appeared to think of nothing but Georgiana’s comfort. She displayed a combination of servility and bossiness, taking a great delight in fussing round her. She hardly ever used ‘I’, Lady Spencer noticed; it was always ‘we’. Her voice, hair and clothes were all arranged in a faithful, if not disconcerting, imitation of Georgiana’s – Lady Spencer was sure that most of her clothes had once belonged to her daughter. Yet Georgiana not only didn’t seem to mind Bess’s behaviour; she encouraged it. They used code words and nicknames for each other which made Lady Spencer feel excluded. The Duke was called Canis, which was obviously a reference to his fondness for dogs. But for reasons which have never been clear Georgiana was Mrs Rat, and Bess, Racky. Lady Spencer feared that Harriet would also become infected by Bess’s charm. ‘I do beg you will comply with my earnest request of letting me know at the very first moment of anything that distresses, vexes, or ails you,’ she wrote anxiously, ‘unless you think any body else has a sincerer affection for you and is from that more worthy of your confidence.’31
Shortly after their return to London Georgiana announced that she was pregnant again. She was healthier than she had been for many years, but her mental state seemed precarious: she was beset by ‘feels’ which made her cry constantly and prevented her from sleeping. ‘I wrote you a letter in very bad spirits this morning,’ Georgiana confessed to her mother on 1 December. ‘It is but justice to tell you how much I am mended now and not all uncomfortable, the feels [are] abated and am not near so nervous.’ But the spectre of Bess loomed: ‘Lady Eliz. desires me to express to you,’ she added, ‘how much she is touch’d and flatter’d by your goodness to her … and how sensible she is of any interest you take in her.’32 Lady Spencer’s response to Bess’s overtures was curt: ‘I hope Lady Eliz does not lose sight of going abroad.’33
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