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

Undaunted, Lady Spencer decided they should try Italy. She wrote to her mother in July and asked her to come out to Spa to look after Georgiana while they were away. She admitted that she was leaving Georgiana behind ‘with some difficulty’, but she had always placed her role as a wife before that of motherhood. For Georgiana, already missing her siblings, her mother’s sudden and inexplicable abandonment was a profound shock. ‘Miss Spencer told me today she lov’d me very well but did not like to stay with me without her mama,’ her grandmother recorded in her diary.²³ For the next twelve months Georgiana lived in Antwerp with her grandmother, who supervised her education. Believing, perhaps, that her parents had left her behind as a punishment for some unnamed misdeed, Georgiana became acutely self-conscious and anxious to please. She imitated her grandmother’s likes and dislikes, training herself to anticipate the expectations of adults. ‘We are now 38 at table,’ Mrs Poyntz wrote in June 1764, ten months after Georgiana’s parents had left Spa. ‘Miss Spencer is adored by all the company, they are astonished to see a child of her age never ask for anything of the dinner or desert but what I give her.’²⁴

When her daughter and son-in-law returned Mrs Poyntz was amazed at the intensity of Georgiana’s reaction: ‘I never saw a child so overjoy’d, she could hardly speak or eat her dinner.’²⁵ Lady Spencer immediately noticed that there was something different about her daughter but she decided she liked the change. ‘I had the happiness of finding my dear Mother and Sweet girl quite well,’ she wrote to one of her friends; ‘the latter is vastly improved.’²⁶ Although Lady Spencer did not realize it, the improvement was at the cost of Georgiana’s self-confidence. Without the inner resources which normally develop in childhood, she grew up depending far too much on other people. As a child it made her obedient; as an adult it made her susceptible to manipulation.

Three years later, in 1766, a tragedy occurred which had repercussions for the whole family. Lady Spencer had become pregnant with her fourth child and, in the autumn of 1765, gave birth to a daughter named Charlotte. The child symbolized a much needed fresh start after the Spencers’ eighteen-month absence from England, which was perhaps why she engrossed Lady Spencer’s attention just as Georgiana had done nine years before. ‘She is a sweet little poppet,’ she wrote.²⁷ This time Lady Spencer breastfed the baby herself instead of hiring a wet nurse, and persevered even though it hurt and made her ‘low’. Georgiana’s notes to her mother when Lady Spencer was in London suggest that she was more than a little jealous of the new arrival.²⁸ But infant mortality, although improved since the seventeenth century, was still high. Charlotte died shortly after her first birthday.

Lord and Lady Spencer were shattered by the loss. ‘You know the perhaps uncommon tenderness I have for my children,’ Lady Spencer explained to her friend Thea Cowper. Three years later, in 1769, Charlotte was still very much in her heart when she had another daughter, whom they called Louise. But she too died after only a few weeks. After this the Spencers travelled obsessively, sometimes with and sometimes without the children, never spending more than a few months in England at a stretch. Seeking an answer for their ‘heavy affliction’, they turned to religion for comfort and Lady Spencer began to show the first signs of the religious fanaticism which later overshadowed her life.

At night, however, religion was far from their thoughts as they sought distraction in more worldly pursuits. They set up gaming tables at Spencer House and Althorp and played incessantly with their friends until the small hours. Lady Spencer tried to control herself: ‘Played at billiards and bowls and cards all evening and a part of the night,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Enable me O God to persevere in my endeavour to conquer this habit as far as it is a vice,’ she prayed on another occasion.²⁹ The more hours she spent at the gambling table, the more she punished herself with acts of self-denial. By the time Georgiana was old enough to be conscious of her mother’s routine, Lady Spencer had tied herself to a harsh regimen: up at 5.30 every morning, prayers for an hour, the Bible for a further hour, followed by a meagre breakfast at nine, and then household duties and good works until dinner. But in her heart she knew that her actions contained more show than feeling. ‘I know,’ she wrote, ‘that there is a mixture of Vanity and false humility about me that is detestable.’³⁰ However, knowledge of her faults did not change her ways. Twenty years later a friend complained: ‘She is toujours Lady Spencer, Vanity and bragging will not leave her, she lugg’d in by the head and shoulders that she had been at Windsor.’³¹

The children were silent witnesses to their parents’ troubled life. Sometimes Georgiana and Harriet would creep downstairs to watch the noisy scenes taking place around the gaming table. ‘I staid till one hour past twelve, but mama remained till six next morning,’ Harriet wrote in her diary.³² When the children were older they were allowed to participate. Harriet recorded on a trip to Paris: ‘A man came today to papa to teach him how he might always win at Pharo, and talked of it as a certainty, telling all his rules, and when papa told him he always lost himself, the man assur’d him it was for want of money and patience, for that his secret was infallible. Everybody has given him something to play for them, and papa gave him a louis d’or for my sister and me.’³³

Georgiana reacted to the loss of Charlotte and Louise by worrying excessively about her two younger siblings. She also became highly sensitive to criticism and the smallest remonstrance produced hysterical screams and protracted crying. Lady Spencer tried many different experiments to calm Georgiana, forcing her to spend hours in prayer and confining her to her room – to little effect.³⁴ It was in her nature to oversee every aspect of a project, and from this time forward Lady Spencer left nothing in Georgiana’s development to chance. Even her thoughts were subject to scrutiny. ‘Pray sincerely to God,’ Lady Spencer ordered her, ‘that he would for Jesus Christ’s sake give his assistance without which you must not hope to do anything.’³⁵

When she reached adolescence Georgiana’s tendency to over-react became less marked, but not enough to allay her mother’s fear for her future happiness. In November 1769 both George and Harriet were dangerously ill and Lady Spencer confided to a friend that the twelve-year-old Georgiana had shown ‘upon this as upon every other occasion such a charming sensibility that it is impossible not to be pleased with it, tho’ when I reflect upon it I assure you it gives me concern as I know by painful experience how much such a disposition will make her suffer hereafter.’³⁶

Georgiana was only fourteen when people began to speculate on her choice of husband. Lady Spencer thought it would be a dreadful mistake if she married too young. ‘I hope not to part with her till 18 at the soonest,’ she told a friend in 1771.³⁷ Her daughter’s outward sophistication led many to think that she was more mature than her years. In 1772 the family embarked upon another grand tour, this time with all three children in tow. The rapturous reception which greeted Georgiana in Paris confirmed Lady Spencer’s fears. According to a fellow English traveller, ‘Lady Georgiana Spencer has been very highly admired. She has, I believe, an exceedingly good disposition of her own, and is happy in an education which it is to be hoped will counteract any ill effect from what may too naturally turn her head.’³⁸

Georgiana combined a perfect mastery of etiquette with a mischievous grace and ease which met with approval in the artificial and mannered atmosphere of the French court. Wherever Georgiana accompanied Lady Spencer people marvelled at the way in which she seemed so natural and yet also conscious of being on show. Many were daunted by the complex and highly choreographed set-pieces which passed for social discourse in French salons. ‘It was no ordinary science,’ reminisced a retired courtier, ‘to know how to enter with grace and assurance a salon where thirty men and women were seated in a circle round the fire, to penetrate this circle while bowing slightly to everyone, to advance straight to the mistress of the house, and to retire with honour, without clumsily disarranging one’s fine clothes, lace ruffles, [and] head-dress of thirty-six curls powdered like rime …’³⁹

The family travelled around France for a few months and then moved on to Spa in the summer of 1773, where Georgiana celebrated her sixteenth birthday. They found many friends already there, including the twenty-four-year-old Duke of Devonshire. His family had always been regular visitors: it was at Spa that his father the fourth Duke had died in 1764 aged forty-four, worn out after his short but harrowing stint as Prime Minister in 1756.* The Devonshires ranked among the first families of England and commanded a special place in British history. They had been involved in politics since the reign of Henry VIII, when Sir William Cavendish oversaw the dissolution of the monasteries. Sir William was the second husband of four to the redoubtable Bess of Hardwick, the richest woman in England after Elizabeth I and the most prolific builder of her age. He was the only one whom she married for love, and when she died all her accumulated wealth went to her Cavendish sons. The eldest, William, used his mother’s fortune to purchase the earldom of Devonshire from James I for £10,000. His descendants followed his example and devoted their lives to increasing the family’s wealth and power.

Seventy years later, on 30 June 1688, the fourth Earl of Devonshire joined with six other parliamentary notables (‘the Immortal Seven’) and issued a secret invitation to William of Orange to come to England and take the throne from the Catholic James II. When William arrived the Earl personally toured the Midlands with his own militia and subdued the countryside around Derbyshire and Cheshire. He received a dukedom for his bravery, as did several of his Whig colleagues. It was not bigotry which had prompted the first Duke to act but political idealism; he, along with many other Whigs, had suspected King James of plotting to reduce the power of parliament in order to establish an absolutist monarchy, similar to that enjoyed by his cousin Louis XIV in France. William’s acceptance of their offer of the crown, as well as the conditions imposed by parliament, resulted in the establishment of the Revolution Settlement. This guaranteed the sovereignty of parliament over a constitutional monarchy, and restricted the succession to royal members of the Protestant faith. Subsequent generations of Whigs revered the 1688 revolutionaries as the guardians of English liberty. They looked to the descendants of the Immortal Seven to maintain the Whig party and to keep its ideals alive.

At first the fortunes of the party fluctuated as its leaders gained or lost favour at court, and factions fought for control. By 1714, however, the Whigs had crushed the rival Tory party and from then on they experienced little opposition except from disgruntled members within their own party. The first two Georges suspected the defeated Tories of having Jacobite sympathies – certainly some had links with the exiled heir of King James – and proscribed the party from office. By the time the twenty-two-year-old George III ascended the throne in 1760 the terms Whig and Tory had become almost obsolete. Instead there were different factions of Whigs led by rival politicians. The Cavendishes, Pelhams and Russels had been in power for so many years that political office seemed theirs by right; they were entirely unprepared for what followed. The new King’s first act was to dismiss the cabinet. He had long regarded the Whig leadership as a cynical and corrupt rabble, and in their place he appointed his tutor, Lord Bute, to form a new government.

The fourth Duke of Devonshire was among the casualties. Without warning the King removed him from his post as Lord Chamberlain and had his name scratched from the Privy Council. After a lifetime spent serving the court this graceless demotion was an insult which the Duke would never forgive nor the party forget. When he died a few years later his sixteen-year-old son William (who was never referred to as anything except ‘the Duke’) inherited the quarrel and automatically became heir-presumptive to the leadership of the Whig party. But a contemporary politician, Nathaniel Wraxall, who knew him well, bemoaned the fact that the Whigs had to rely on a man so ill-suited to public life: ‘Constitutional apathy formed his distinguishing characteristic. His figure was tall and manly, though not animated or graceful, his manners, always calm and unruffled. He seemed to be incapable of any strong emotion, and destitute of all energy or activity of mind. As play became indispensable in order to arouse him from his lethargic habit, and to awaken his torpid faculties, he passed his evenings usually at Brooks’s, engaged at whist or faro.’⁴⁰

The Duke had had a lonely upbringing which was reflected in his almost pathological reserve. One of his daughters later joked that their only means of communication was through her dog: ‘the whole of tea and again at supper, we talked of no one subject but the puppies … I quite rejoice at having one in my possession, for it is never a failing method of calling his attention and attracting his notice.’⁴¹ However, behind the Duke’s wooden façade was an intelligent and well-educated mind. According to Wraxall, his friends regarded him as an expert on Shakespeare and the classics: ‘On all disputes that occasionally arose among the members of the club [Brooks’s] relative to passages of the Roman poets or historians, I know that appeal was commonly made to the Duke, and his decision or opinion was regarded as final.’⁴²

The Duke had barely known his mother, Lady Charlotte Boyle, who died when he was six. The fourth Duke had married her against his own mother’s wishes. There was no clear reason for the Duchess’s objection – she called it ‘an accursed match’ – particularly since Lady Charlotte brought a vast fortune to the family, her father, the Earl of Burlington, having no heir. But the Duchess would have nothing more to do with her son; when he died ten years later she made no attempt to see her grandchildren. The fifth Duke, his two brothers Lords Richard and George, and sister Lady Dorothy, were brought up in cold splendour in the care of their Cavendish uncles.

Georgiana’s future husband was only sixteen when he came into an income that was twice Lord Spencer’s; by one account it amounted to more than £60,000 a year. His property included not only the magnificent Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Devonshire House in London, but five other estates of comparable grandeur: Lismore Castle in Ireland, Hardwick House and Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, and Chiswick House and Burlington House in London. He was one of the most sought-after bach-elors in London – although Mrs Delany was mystified as to the reason why. ‘The Duke’s intimate friends say he has sense, and does not want merit,’ she wrote. But in her opinion he was boring and gauche: ‘To be sure the Jewell has not been well polished: had he fallen under the tuition of the late Lord Chesterfield he might have possessed les graces, but at present only that of his dukedom belongs to him.’⁴³ As one newspaper delicately put it, ‘His Grace is an amiable and respectable character, but dancing is not his forte.’⁴⁴

Superficially, the Duke’s character seemed not unlike Lord Spencer’s: however, behind a shy exterior Georgiana’s father concealed strong feelings. One of his few surviving letters to Georgiana, written after her marriage, bears eloquent witness to his warm heart: ‘But indeed my Dearest Georgiana, I did not know till lately how much I loved you; I miss you every day and every hour.’⁴⁵ The twenty-four-year-old Duke had no such hidden sweetness, although Georgiana thought he did. Knowing how awkward her father could be in public, she assumed that the Duke masked his true nature from all but his closest confidants. The fact that her parents treated him so respectfully also elevated the Duke in her eyes. The Spencers were extremely gratified by the interest he showed in their eldest daughter, and it did not escape Georgiana’s notice that she was being watched; she knew that her parents wanted her to succeed.

By the end of summer, having danced with the Duke on several occasions and sat near him at numerous dinners, Georgiana had fallen in love with the idea of marrying him. His departure from Spa in the autumn of 1772 upset her greatly; she feared that he would make his choice before she was grown up. ‘I have not heard that the Duke of Devonshire is talked of for anybody,’ her cousin reassured her after receiving an enquiry about a rumour linking him with Lady Betty Hamilton. ‘Indeed I have heard very little of him this Winter.’⁴⁶ Lady Spencer, on the other hand, was relieved that the Duke had not made a formal offer. Even though there could be no more illustrious a match, she did not want her daughter to be a child-bride. Georgiana ‘is indeed a lovely young woman,’ she confided to a friend, ‘very pleasing in her figure, but infinitely more so from her character and disposition; my dread is that she will be snatched from me before her age and experience make her by any means fit for the serious duties of a wife, a mother, or the mistress of a family.’⁴⁷

In fact the Duke had already made up his mind to marry Georgiana. She was an obvious choice: socially the Spencers were almost equal to the Cavendishes, she had a large dowry, she seemed likely to be popular and, most important, she was young and malleable. Despite Lady Spencer’s reservations, discussions between the two families began in earnest while the Spencers were still abroad, and were concluded after they returned to England in the spring of 1774. By now Georgiana was almost seventeen and preparing to make her entrance into society. Hers was not to be an arranged marriage in the sense of those common a generation before.⁴⁸ She was not exchanged in lieu of gambling debts, nor thrown in as part of a political alliance.* However, it cannot be said that Georgiana had been free to make a proper choice. Unlike her mother she had not been out for several seasons before her marriage, and she had not accepted the Duke because she loved him ‘above all men upon Earth’. She would go to any lengths to please her parents, and that included thinking herself in love with a man she hardly knew. But her happiness at his proposal convinced the Spencers that they were facilitating a love-match.

As the marriage approached Georgiana’s faults became an obsession with her mother, who feared that her daughter did not understand the responsibilities which would come with her new role: ‘I had flatter’d myself I should have had more time to have improv’d her understanding and, with God’s assistance to have strengthened her principles, and enabled her to avoid the many snares that vice and folly will throw in her way. She is amiable, innocent and benevolent, but she is giddy, idle and fond of dissipation.’⁴⁹ Whenever they were apart, Lady Spencer criticized Georgiana’s behaviour in long letters filled with ‘hints to form your own conduct … when you are so near entering into a world abounding with dissipation, vice and folly’.⁵⁰ In one, she included a list of rules governing a married woman’s behaviour on Sundays. Georgiana would have to rise early, pray, instruct the children or servants, then read an improving book, and above all ‘make it a rule to be among the first [to church], and to shew by my good humour and attention to everybody that I saw nothing in religion or a Sunday to make people silent, ill-bred or uncomfortable …’ Flirting and gossip were to be absolutely avoided on this day.⁵¹

Most observers shared Lady Spencer’s disquiet, although not for the same reason.

We drank tea in the Spring Gardens [recorded Mary Hamilton in her diary]: Lady Spencer and daughter, Lady Georgiana, and the Duke of Devonshire joined us: he walked between Lady Georgiana and I, we were very Chatty, but not one word spoke the Duke to his betrothed nor did one smile grace his dull visage. – Notwithstanding his rank and fortune I wd not marry him – they say he is sensible and has good qualities – it is a pity he is not more ostensibly agreeable, dear charming Lady Georgiana will not be well matched.⁵²

Mrs Delany had come to a similar conclusion. She happened to be at a ball in May where Georgiana danced for so long that she fainted from the heat and the constriction of her dress – ‘Which of course made a little bustle,’ she informed her friend. ‘His (philosophical) Grace was at the other end of the room and ask’d “what’s that?” They told him and he replied with his usual demureness (alias dullness), “I thought the noise – was – among – the – women.”’ He did not even make a pretence of going over to where Georgiana lay to see how she was.⁵³

Meanwhile the Spencers assembled a trousseau more lavish than those of many princesses on the Continent. In three months they spent a total of £1,486 on hundreds of items: sixty-five pairs of shoes filled one trunk, forty-eight pairs of stockings and twenty-six ‘and a half’ pairs of gloves filled another.⁵⁴ They bought hats, feathers and trimmings; morning dresses, walking dresses, riding habits and ball gowns. There was her wedding dress to be made, her court dress, her first visiting dress, as well as cloaks, shawls and wraps. The prospect of a union between two such wealthy and powerful families naturally caught the attention of the press – there had been no Duchess of Devonshire for over two decades. People described the marriage as the wedding of the year and anticipated that the new Duchess of Devonshire would revive the former splendour of Devonshire House. The Whig grandees also looked upon the match with favour, hoping that the married state would have a beneficial effect on the Duke.

The wedding took place on 7 June 1774, two days earlier than the official date. There had been so much publicity about the marriage that the Spencers feared the church would be mobbed with curious onlookers. They persuaded the Duke to accompany them to Wimbledon Park and have the service conducted in the parish church there. According to Mrs Delany, Georgiana knew nothing of their plans until the morning of the ceremony. She did not mind at all; a secret marriage appealed to her. ‘She is so peculiarly happy as to think his Grace very agreeable’ and, to Mrs Delany’s surprise, ‘had not the least regret’ about anything. She wore a white and gold dress, with silver slippers on her feet and pearl drops in her hair. There were only five people present: the Duke’s brother, Lord Richard Cavendish, and his sister Dorothy, who was now the Duchess of Portland, and on Georgiana’s side only her parents and grandmother, Lady Cowper.⁵⁵ Georgiana’s feelings clearly showed on her face, while the Duke appeared inscrutable. His new wife may have occupied his thoughts, although they may well have turned to another Spencer. Not very far away in a rented villa, on a discreet road where a carriage could come and go unseen, Charlotte Spencer, formerly a milliner and no relation to the Spencers, was nursing a newborn baby: his – their – daughter Charlotte.⁵⁶

* Misspellings have been corrected only where they intrude on the text.

†Georgiana became Lady Georgiana Spencer at the age of eight when her father John Spencer was created the first Earl Spencer in 1765. For the purpose of continuity the Spencers will be referred to as Lord and Lady throughout.

* The usual method for estimating equivalent twentieth-century values is to multiply by sixty.

* The Spencers originally came from Warwickshire, where they farmed sheep. They were successful businessmen and with each generation the family grew a little richer. By 1508 John Spencer had saved enough capital to purchase the 300-acre estate of Althorp. He also acquired a coat of arms and a knighthood from Henry VIII. His descendants were no less diligent, and a hundred years later, when Robert Spencer was having his portrait painted for the saloon, he was at the head of one of the richest farming families in England. King James I, who could never resist an attractive young man, gave him a peerage and a diplomatic post to the court of Duke Frederick of Wurttemberg. From then on the Spencers left farming to their agents and concentrated on court politics.

*His father, the Hon. John Spencer, was in fact a younger son and, given the law of primogeniture, had always expected to marry his fortune or live in debt. However, his mother was the daughter of the first Duke of Marlborough, and the Marlboroughs had no heir. To prevent the line from dying out the Marlboroughs obtained special dispensation for the title to pass through the female line. John’s older brother Charles became the next Duke. John, meanwhile, became head of the Spencer family and subsequently inherited Althorp. Charles had inherited the title but, significantly, he had no right to the Marlborough fortune until his grandmother Duchess Sarah, the widowed Duchess of Marlborough, died. Except for Blenheim Palace, she could leave the entire estate to whomever she chose. Sarah had strong political beliefs and she was outraged when Charles disobeyed her instruction to oppose the government of the day. In retribution she left Marlborough’s £1 million estate to John, with the sole proviso that neither he nor his son should ever accept a government post.

* My heart is yours. Keep it well.

* Political life had not suited the reserved and honest Duke. But for the rivalry between Henry Fox and William Pitt, neither of whom would support a government with the other as its leader, George 11 would not have chosen this ‘amiable, straightforward man’, who was noted ‘for common sense rather than statesmanship’. The Duke shared with Lord Spencer, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship, a total lack of aptitude for the bravado of parliamentary politics. Dr Johnson said of him, ‘If he promised you an acorn, and none had grown that year in his woods, he would have sent to Denmark for it.’ But if asked to formulate a strategy for dealing with the French he sat there helplessly, waiting for someone to suggest an idea. He only participated in government out of a sense of duty and the effort it cost him ruined his health and destroyed his peace of mind.

* In 1719 the Duke of Richmond, finding himself unable to meet his obligations, paid off his debts by agreeing to have his eighteen-year-old heir married to the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Earl of Cadogan. The ceremony took place almost immediately, after which the girl was returned to the nursery and did not see her husband again until she was sixteen.

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.

Georgiana and the Duke were naturally placed to become the leaders of society’s most select group, known as the ton or ‘the World’ – the ultra-fashionable people who decided whether a play was a success, an artist a genius, or what colour would be ‘in’ that season. Henry Fielding was only half-joking when he said that ‘Nobody’ was ‘all the people in Great Britain, except about 1200’.²⁷ The ton certainly believed this to be the case. The writer and reluctant courtier Fanny Burney made fun of its self-absorption in Cecilia: ‘Why, he’s the very head of the ton,’ Miss Larolles says of Mr Matthews. ‘There’s nothing in the world so fashionable as taking no notice of things, and never seeing people, and saying nothing at all, and never hearing a word, and not knowing one’s own acquaintance, and always finding fault; all the ton do so.’

The social tyrants who made up the ton also considered it deeply unfashionable for a wife and husband to be seen too much in each other’s company. The Duke escorted Georgiana to the opera once and then resumed his habit of visiting Brooks’s, where he always ordered the same supper – a broiled blade-bone of mutton – and played cards until five or six in the morning.²⁸ Occasionally they went to a party together but Georgiana was expected to make her own social arrangements. There was no shortage of invitations and she accepted everything – routs, assemblies, card parties, promenades in the park – in an effort to avoid sitting alone in Devonshire House.

With her instinctive ability to make an impression, Georgiana immediately caused a sensation. She always appeared natural, even when she was called upon to open a ball in front of 800 people. She could engage in friendly chatter with several people simultaneously, leaving each with the impression that it had been a memorable event. She was ‘so handsome, so agreeable, so obliging in her manner, that I am quite in love with her,’ Mrs Delany burbled to a friend. ‘I can’t tell you all the civil things she said, and really they deserve a better name, which is kindness embellished by politeness. I hope she will illumine and reform her contemporaries!’²⁹ Even cynics like Horace Walpole found their resistance worn down by Georgiana’s unforced charm and directness. Observing her transformation into a society figure, Walpole marvelled that this ‘lovely girl, natural, and full of grace’ could retain these qualities and yet be so much on show. ‘The Duchess of Devonshire effaces all,’ he wrote a few weeks after her arrival in London. She achieved it ‘without being a beauty; but her youth, figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty, and modest familiarity, make her a phenomenon’.³⁰

The few voices raised in criticism of Georgiana were not heeded, except by Lady Spencer. ‘I think there is too much of her,’ was one woman’s opinion. ‘She gives me the idea of being larger than life.’³¹ Lady Mary Coke thought Georgiana was making herself ridiculous and that her behaviour occasionally verged on hysteria. The Duchess went to visit Lady Harriet Foley, she wrote, just as her house and contents were being seized by the bailiffs, and ‘as her Grace’s misfortune is a very unnatural one, that of being too happy and of being delighted with everything she hears and sees, so the situation in which she found Lady Harriet was, in her Grace’s opinion, Charming; Lady Harriet told her she had no clothes, this was charming above measure.’³²

Occasionally Georgiana drank too much, especially when she was nervous, and showed off as a result: ‘nothing is talked of but the Duchess of Devonshire: and I am sorry to say not much in her favour,’ wrote a society lady after Georgiana upset a dignified matron by pulling out her hair feathers.³³ Lady Mary Coke went to Ranelagh and was disgusted to see Georgiana and her new friends amusing themselves by puffing out their cheeks and popping them.³⁴ She could be persuaded to do anything: once she even appeared on stage at Hampton Court and danced in an opera organized by the fashionable wit and playwright Anthony Storer. Lady Spencer was worried when she saw how easily her daughter could be influenced: ‘when others draw you out of your own character, and make you assume one that is quite a stranger to you, it is difficult to distinguish you under the disguise,’ she warned.³⁵ Mrs Delany feared that rather than reforming her contemporaries Georgiana was more likely to be corrupted by them: ‘This bitter reflection arises from what I hear every body says of a great and handsome relation of ours just beginning her part; but I do hope she will be like the young actors and actresses, who begin with over acting when they first come upon the stage … but I tremble for her.’³⁶

Lady Spencer could see that Georgiana was falling in with the fast set. The gambling in particular worried her: ‘let me entreat you to beware of it, and if [gambling] is mention’d to you any more, to decline the taking any part in it,’ she begged.³⁷ Gaming was to the aristocracy what gin was to the working classes: it caused the ruin of families and corrupted people’s lives. ‘A thousand meadows and cornfields are staked at every throw, and as many villages lost as in the earthquake that overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii,’ wrote Horace Walpole, who had seen men lose an entire estate in a single night. ‘Play at whist, commerce, backgammon, trictrac or chess,’ Lady Spencer urged, ‘but never at quinze, lou, brag, faro, hazard or any games of chance, and if you are pressed to play always make the fashionable excuse of being tied up not to play at such and such a game. In short I must beg you, my dearest girl, if you value my happiness to send me in writing a serious answer to this.’³⁸

Lady Clermont, who had known the Spencer family for many years, counselled Lady Spencer against being too critical: ‘I hope you don’t talk to her too often about trifles, when she does any little thing that is not right … If we can but keep her out of the fire for a year or two, or rather from being burn’d, for in the fire she is, it will all be well.’³⁹ But Lady Spencer was too worried to listen; instead she tried to frighten Georgiana into adopting a more mature exterior. ‘You must learn to respect yourself,’ she wrote in April 1775, ‘and the world will soon follow your example; but while you herd only with the vicious and the profligate you will be like them, pert, familiar, noisy and indelicate, not to say indecent in their contempt for the censures of the grave, and their total disregard of the opinion of the world in general, you will be lost indeed past recovery.’⁴⁰

Georgiana – as dependent on parental approval as ever – felt guilty and went to even greater lengths to distract herself with frivolity. Her recklessness entranced society even as it caused disapproval. Whatever she wore became instantly fashionable. Women’s hair was already arranged high above the head, but Georgiana took the fashion a step further by creating the three-foot hair tower. She stuck pads of horse hair to her own hair using scented pomade and decorated the top with miniature ornaments. Sometimes she carried a ship in full sail, or an exotic arrangement of stuffed birds and waxed fruit, or even a pastoral tableau with little wooden trees and sheep. Even though the towers required the help of at least two hairdressers and took several hours to arrange, Georgiana’s designs inspired others to imitate her. ‘The Duchess of Devonshire is the most envied woman of the day in the Ton,’ the newspapers reported.⁴¹ It was true; women competed with each other to construct the tallest head, ignoring the fact that it made quick movements impossible and the only way to ride in a carriage was to sit on the floor.

Another of Georgiana’s innovations was the drooping ostrich feather, which she attached in a wide arch across the front of her hair. In April Lord Stormont, the British ambassador in Paris, presented her with one that was four feet long.⁴² Overnight it became the most important accessory in a lady’s wardrobe, even though the tall nodding plumes were difficult to find and extremely expensive.⁴³ The ton wore them with a smug arrogance which infuriated the less fortunate. The fashion generated resentment: it was too excessive and too exclusive. The Queen banned ostrich feathers from court, and according to Lady Louisa Stuart, ‘the unfortunate feathers were insulted, mobbed, hissed, almost pelted wherever they appeared, abused in the newspapers, nay even preached at in the pulpits and pointed out as marks of reprobation’.⁴⁴

In less than a year Georgiana had become a celebrity. Newspaper editors noticed that any report on the Duchess of Devonshire increased their sales. She brought glamour and style to a paper. A three-ring circus soon developed between newspapers who saw commercial value in her fame, ordinary readers who were fascinated by her, and Georgiana herself who enjoyed the attention. The more editors printed stories about her, the more she obliged by playing up to them. Her arrival coincided with the flowering of the English press. A growing population, increased wealth, better roads, and an end to official censorship had resulted in a wider readership and more news to report. By the end of the 1770s there were nine daily newspapers, all based in London, and hundreds of biand tri-weekly provincial papers which reprinted the London news. For the first time national figures emerged, Georgiana among them, which the whole country read about and discussed, and with whom they could feel some sort of connection.

The Morning Post reported Georgiana’s progress to a nation whose appetite for news about her was constantly growing:

The Duchess of D—e has a fashionable coat of mail; impregnable to the arrows of wit or ridicule; many other females of distinction have been made to moult, and rather than be laughed at any longer, left themselves featherless; while her Grace, with all the dignity of a young Duchess is determined to keep the field, for her feathers increase in enormity in proportion to the public intimations she receives of the absurdity. Her head was a wonderful exhibition on Saturday night at the Opera. The Duke is quoted as saying she is welcome to do as she likes as long as she doesn’t think it ‘necessary that I should wear any ornaments on my head in compliment to her notions of taste and dress’.

The London Chronicle reported with outrage that a crowd had almost attacked Georgiana when she visited the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh

dressed in a stile so whimsically singular as quickly collected the company round her, they behaved with great rudeness, in so much that she was necessitated to take shelter in one of the boxes, and there remained prisoner for some time, until the motley crew had retired, and left only those behind who scorned to offer insult to a fine woman for indulging her fancy in the most innocent and inoffensive manner, and who were capable of discovering, amidst her levity, an understanding that would distinguish her in any court in Europe.⁴⁵

On the whole, society took Georgiana’s fashion excesses in good part, and even when people teased her it was done with gentle humour. One night at the opera she entered her box just as the celebrated Signor Lovattini came on stage to sing. He was wearing an enormous headdress of red and white flowers in imitation of the one Georgiana had worn on her last visit. The audience burst out laughing and Georgiana, rather than taking offence, turned to Lovattini and made him a low bow which earned her cheers of approval.⁴⁶ People were enraptured by a duchess who was happy to exchange banter with the crowd. On another occasion the Morning Post reported that the audience in the Haymarket Theatre had lapsed into giggles when a couple appeared in the stalls dressed up in a parody of the Devonshires. The woman wore ostrich feathers in her hair and enormous breeches which extended up to her armpits while her male companion was wearing an oversized petticoat with a ducal coronet and jewels on his head.⁴⁷ It was not an attack on Georgiana so much as a comment on the Duke’s inadequacies. In less than a year she had eclipsed her husband and become a popular figure in her own right.

During that year Georgiana had also brought herself to a state of nervous and physical exhaustion. She had suffered at least one miscarriage, which convinced Lady Spencer that her daughter should leave England, if only to remain quiet for a while. In July the Spencers and the Devonshires set off for a holiday in Spa. After a few weeks in the open air Georgiana’s health returned and her unnatural pallor disappeared. On their return they stopped at Versailles to pay their respects to Louis XVI. Georgiana already had more than a passing acquaintance with Marie Antoinette, having met her during previous trips to France. On this visit a close friendship developed which lasted until the Queen’s execution in 1793. They discovered they had much in common, not only in having married a position rather than a lover, but also in their relations with their mothers. Empress Marie Thérèse combined an intense, almost suffocating love for her children with a manipulative and dominating manner. While Georgiana was in Paris Marie Antoinette received the following scolding from her mother which sounded uncannily like many of Lady Spencer’s letters:

What frivolity! Where is the kind and generous heart of the Archduchess Antoinette? All I see is intrigue, low hatred, a persecuting spirit, and cheap wit … Your too early success and your entourage of flatterers have always made me fear for you, ever since that winter when you wallowed in pleasures and ridiculous fashions. Those excursions from pleasure to pleasure without the King and in the knowledge that he doesn’t enjoy them and that he either accompanies you or leaves you free out of sheer good nature … Where is the respect and gratitude you owe him for all his kindness?⁴⁸

Three weeks later Georgiana received a similar inquiry from Lady Spencer, who complained, among other things, about her inattentiveness towards the Duke. ‘You do not say anything of [him] – how does he employ and amuse himself?’ she asked.⁴⁹

Similar words have often been used to describe both Georgiana and Marie Antoinette. Horace Walpole thought Marie Antoinette grace itself, and called her a ‘statue of beauty’. She had immense charm, which at first endeared her to the court and the people, but she shared Georgiana’s tendency to take everything to excess. On a typical evening she would go to the opera, leave early for an intimate supper, rush to several balls, and finish off the night gambling with Mme de Guémène, whom everyone suspected of cheating. Her addiction to trivial amusements has been attributed to her frustration with her marriage. A naturally romantic woman, she had little in common with her reserved and awkward husband. ‘The great obstacle to this perfect union is the incompatibility of the tastes and characters of the two spouses,’ wrote an observer. ‘The King is calm, rather passive, loving the solitude of his library … His wife is … extremely vivacious, loving a quick succession of pleasures and their diversity.’⁵⁰ Marie Antoinette loved extravagant coiffures and clothes and, like Georgiana, enjoyed being at the forefront of fashion. But she chose her friends unwisely, from among the most dissipated in French society. They led the tractable Queen into one scrape after another.

It was on this visit, too, that Georgiana formed life-long friendships with members of Marie Antoinette’s set, particularly with the ambitious Polignacs. The Austrian ambassador to France complained to the Empress Marie Thérèse that Marie Antoinette was infatuated with the Duchesse de Polignac. The ‘Little Po’, as she was nicknamed, was a sweet-natured, elegant brunette, very much under her husband’s thumb, who nevertheless exerted a powerful attraction on both Marie Antoinette and Georgiana. Throughout Georgiana’s stay the three women went everywhere together, wore each other’s favours on their bosoms, and exchanged locks of hair as keepsakes. They met in a highly charged feminine atmosphere where feelings ruled and kisses and embraces were part of the ordinary language of communication. Georgiana’s passionate nature, thwarted in her marriage to the Duke, found fulfilment in such an atmosphere.

On her return to England Georgiana made a renewed effort to please her husband. Initially he responded with unaccustomed sensitivity. ‘The Duke is in very good spirits,’ she wrote in September 1775. ‘I sincerely hope he is contented with me, tho’ if he is not he hides it very well, for it is impossible to say how good and attentive he is to me, and how much he seems to make it his business to see me happy and pleas’d – with so much reason as he has had to be discontented at such a number of things, I have very little right to expect [it].’⁵¹ Lady Spencer’s friend Miss Lloyd thought that Georgiana was telling the truth and that they appeared to be getting on well together: ‘I think they are grown quite in love with each other,’ she wrote.⁵²

But they had so little in common that their efforts to establish a deeper intimacy had petered out by Christmas. It was not a question of dislike; neither understood the other. The Duke was used to being flattered and cossetted by his mistress Charlotte Spencer and resented the emotional demands that Georgiana made upon him. Georgiana, on the other hand, treated him as if he were part of her audience and then wondered why her reserved and shy husband failed to respond. A family tale reveals the misunderstanding between them. The Duke was drinking a dish of tea with Lady Spencer and Harriet when Georgiana walked into the room and sat on his lap with her arms around his neck. Without saying a word he pushed her off and left the company.⁵³

Rejected by the Duke, Georgiana once more sought consolation in the fashionable world as soon as the season began. Newspapers speculated on how long she could keep up the frantic pace of her life before her health collapsed.⁵⁴ They only had to wait a couple of months. In April 1776 Georgiana went into premature labour. No one was surprised by her miscarriage. ‘The Duchess of Devonshire lies dangerously ill,’ reported the Morning Post, ‘and we hear the physicians have ascribed her indisposition to the reigning fashionable irregularities of the age.’⁵⁵ The next day it claimed with gloomy pleasure that the physicians had given up and her death was imminent.

Georgiana denied the prophets of doom their satisfaction, but her recovery was much slower than it should have been. She was harbouring a secret: she was deeply in debt. She had placed all hope of repaying her gambling dues in the birth of the lost child, positive that the Duke would forgive her in the general glow of happiness. Now that her plans had gone awry she had no idea what to do and the worry affected her health. She was not the first woman to find herself in such a predicament; it was a popular theme in the press. The Guardian was blunt: ‘The Man who plays beyond his income, pawns his Estate; the Woman must find something else to Mortgage when her Pin Money is gone. The Husband has his Lands to dispose of; the Wife, her Person.’⁵⁶ Georgiana could not even bring herself to think how she might tell the Duke or her mother that her gambling debts amounted to at least £3,000,* when her pin money came to £4,000 a year. Like everyone else, the Duke blamed the miscarriage on her reckless living.

In July Georgiana’s creditors threatened to apply directly to the Duke, which frightened her into confessing the truth to her parents. They were so angry that Lady Clermont felt obliged to intercede on her behalf:

The conversation you had with the Duchess made so great an impression on her that it made her quite ill. She has not seen anybody since she came to town, except myself, not one of the set. I am convinced she will be very different in everything. She goes to you this evening to stay till the Duke returns from Newmarket. I do beg you will not say any more to her. Look in good spirits whether you are or not, try this for once. For God’s Sake don’t let Lord Spencer say anything to her. I would give the World to go to Wimbledon and not to Newmarket but that is impossible. I told her today that if I could ever be of the least use to her, let me be in France or whatever part of the world I was in, I should go to her. I am sorry. I love her so much.⁵⁷

The Spencers listened to Lady Clermont’s plea for calm. They paid Georgiana’s debts but insisted that she reveal everything to the Duke. When she told him, falteringly and with many tears, he hardly said a word. He promptly repaid her parents and then never referred to the matter again. This unnerved Georgiana more than a display of anger. After a measured period of silence Lady Spencer began writing to her daughter again. She had suffered a profound shock on discovering that Georgiana hid things from her, and she no longer felt so confident about their relationship. ‘Pray take care if you play to carry money in your pocket as much as you care to lose and never go beyond it,’ she repeated. ‘If you stick to commerce and play carefully I think you will not lose more than you can afford, but I beg you will never play quinze or lou, and I shall be very glad if you will tell me honestly in each letter what you have won or lost and at what games every day.’⁵⁸

For the first time since Georgiana’s marriage two years earlier Lady Spencer sensed that she was losing her hold over her daughter and she feared for the future.

* When French visitors attended aristocratic dinners they had difficulty with the table forks, and the English predilection for toasts bored them witless. Regarding the former, the usual complaint, as expressed by Faujas de Saint-Fond, was that they ‘prick my mouth or my tongue with their little sharp steel tridents’. Regarding the latter, it was their inordinate number. The practice of proposing and replying continued throughout the dinner and with even more vigour after the women had left. Toasting the ladies, the food, each other and whatever else came to mind went on for so long there were chamber pots in each corner, and ‘the person who has occasion to use it does not even interrupt his talk during the operation’. André Parreaux, Daily Life, p. 36.

* On one occasion she met the celebrated Dr Johnson, who was visiting a friend in the neighbourhood. The Devonshires were as gratified to be in his presence as he was in theirs. Georgiana was awed by his conversation but, she noted, ‘he din’d here and does not shine quite so much in eating as in conversing, for he ate much and nastily.’ Chatsworth MSS 644: GD to LS, 4–10 September 1784. Nevertheless, she sat next to him throughout the day and, according to Nathaniel Wraxall, was ‘hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson’s lips … All the cynic moroseness of the philosopher and moralist seemed to dissolve under so flattering [an] approach.’ Nathaniel Wraxall, Posthumous and Historical Memoirs of My Own Time (London 1904), I, pp. 113–14.

* £80,000 in today’s money.

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 ‘party’ who went to visit her consisted mostly of the younger generation of Whigs – Lady Carlisle and Lady Jersey in particular. Georgiana was caught between her friends, who sought the additional weight of her celebrity, and her parents, who forbade her to have anything more to do with the unfortunate woman. Everyone was waiting to see what Georgiana would do, said Lady Mary Coke, ‘lest such bad company should influence her’.²⁰ Georgiana argued that it would be hypocritical of her to cut Lady Derby. Fearing her father’s temper, she begged Lady Spencer not to tell him of her request to accompany her friends:

I have the greatest horror of her crime, I can not nor do not try to excuse her. But her conduct has been long imprudent, and yet, I have sup’d at her house, and I have enter’d with her into any scheme of amusement, etc., and now it does seem shocking to me, that at the time this poor creature is in distress, that at the time all her grandeur is crush’d around her, I should entirely abandon her, as if I said, I know you was imprudent formerly, but then you had a gay house and great suppers and so I came to you but now that you have nothing of all this, I will avoid you.²¹

The Spencers disagreed. They gave Georgiana a choice: either she dropped Lady Derby or they would never allow her sister Harriet to visit Devonshire House or Chatsworth. ‘If you sacrifice so much for a person who was never on a footing of friendship,’ wrote Lady Spencer, ‘what are you to do if Lady J or Lady M should proceed (and they are already far on their way) to the same lengths?’²² Georgiana surrendered, a little relieved to be excused from the unpleasant bickering which surrounded the affair. Lady Carlisle had issued an invitation to a party which included Lady Derby as a test of her friends’ loyalty. For four months society thought about nothing else. Then, in April, Lord Derby announced that he would not be divorcing her. It was a terrible revenge; by his refusal – it was almost impossible for a wife to divorce her husband except on the grounds of non-consummation – he consigned his wife to social limbo, disgraced, separated and unprotected. Only marriage to the Duke of Dorset would have brought about her social rehabilitation. Their relationship did not survive the strain of her ostracism, confirming Lady Sarah Lennox’s prediction. Two years later Lady Mary Coke recorded a rumour that Lady Derby had left for Italy with a certain Lord Jocelyn which, she wrote spitefully, merely confirmed her opinion of her.²³

The reputation of the Duke of Dorset did not suffer. He had seduced another man’s wife, but while many people looked askance at his behaviour there was no question of excluding him from society. He even remained friends with Lord Derby and continued to be invited to his house. The Derby affair illustrates the point made by Georgiana in The Sylph: eighteenth-century society tolerated anything so long as there was no scandal. Publicly immoral behaviour earned public censure; private transgressions remained whispered gossip. In Lady Spencer’s words, Lady Derby ‘insulted the World with her Vice’.²⁴

In July 1779, when the season was over, Georgiana went with her parents to Spa. The Duke did not accompany them, pleading military duty, and spent the summer marching his soldiers at the camp. The English and French aristocrats on holiday at Spa behaved as if the two countries were not at war. Good breeding and fine manners counted for more than martial spirits. Madame de Polignac had been waiting for Georgiana to arrive and they passed the holiday together, walking arm in arm through the wooded fields surrounding the village. They were such conspicuous companions that their friendship reached the notice of the English press. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser reported: ‘The reigning female favourite of the Queen of France is Madame Polignac, a great encomiast of the English, and a particular admirer of her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire …’²⁵

On her return in September Georgiana experienced her first battle. They were travelling in a convoy of two packet boats, escorted by a naval sloop, The Fly, for protection. At dawn on 14 September French privateers attacked her boat. The Fly moved in to engage the French ships, enabling the packet boats to escape. Although he possessed only fourteen guns, Captain Garner fought for over two hours until both sides were too exhausted to continue. The half-sinking ship then managed to rejoin its frightened escorts and sail for England. Captain Garner immediately became a hero and the adventure was seized upon by the press as welcome propaganda.²⁶ Spain had also declared war against Britain. The country was now fighting against a triple alliance.

When Georgiana rejoined the Duke at the camp in October 1779 she was appalled by the soldiers’ low morale as well as the lethargy of their leaders. The combined French and Spanish fleets had been sighted in the Channel; the government expected an invasion force to arrive at any day.

Lord Cholmondeley and Cl Dalrymple arriv’d here from Plymouth at 7 – they give a terrible account of the defenceless state of the place and the danger of the troops encamp’d on the Mount Edgcumb side [she wrote]. In case of the enemy’s landing they must all either perish by the invaders or be drown’d in making their escape. They say the troops are all out of spirits and looking on themselves as a forlorn hope, and the Duke of Rutland says he should think himself lucky to escape with the loss of an arm or a leg.²⁷

She was determined to stay and watch the fight, telling her mother: ‘I rather think there will be an invasion and that I shall see something of it to complete the extraordinary sights I have been present at this year.’²⁸ But the camp waited in readiness for an invasion which never came. The strain of anticipation was reflected in the drinking and debauchery that went on after dark; during one all-night party the stables burned down and six horses were killed.

Georgiana was soon fed up with camp life. She was more sensitive now to the sycophancy she perceived in some of her friends. Mrs Crewe, she complained, was caressing her without ceasing. Lady Frances Masham, she noticed, ‘always talks to me as if she thought I had not my five senses like other people’.²⁹ She returned to Devonshire House without the Duke. Her departure annoyed the Cavendishes, who thought she had no right to go anywhere on her own when she had not yet given them an heir. ‘I found the Dss in town,’ wrote Lord Frederick Cavendish to Lady Spencer on 11 November 1779. ‘I never saw her Grace look better, [but] she laments that she has grown fat. To say the truth she does look bigger, I would fain have dropt the last syllable.’³⁰

Fearing that she would never have a child, Georgiana noted every variation in her menstrual cycle with obsessive diligence. ‘The Prince is not yet come,’ she wrote to her mother in October, ‘but my pains are frequent and I continue the Spa water.’³¹ After five and a half years of marriage she was so desperate to conceive that she went to the notorious quack Dr James Graham. Lady Spencer was dismayed. ‘Let me entreat you not to listen to Dr Graham with regard to internal medicines,’ she urged, ‘but consult Warren.’³² Graham’s use of electricity, milk baths and friction techniques to encourage fertility in women and cure impotency in men left her unimpressed. Society, however, had taken him up and Graham was earning sufficient money to practise out of the Adelphi, where his Temple of Health and Hymen attracted long queues of desperate women. ‘Lady Carlisle went to see Dr Graham’s Electrical Machinery in the Adelphi,’ wrote Miss Lloyd to Lady Stafford, ‘[it is] a most curious sight, and he is a most wonderful man. She and I agree that he might be of use to you.’*³³ Georgiana saw him for a couple of months, and then abruptly stopped. Her wish for a child had been answered, only the child was not hers: the Duke had asked her to accept his daughter Charlotte by his late mistress.³⁴

Charlotte Spencer had remained his mistress until at least 1778, but what had happened to her then remains a mystery; it is known only that she died shortly afterwards. Georgiana’s thoughts on the situation have not survived – she almost certainly knew of the relationship: articles about it had appeared in the Bon Ton Magazine and the Town and Country Magazine. The latter had declared, ‘it was the greatest paradox’ that the Duke must be the only man in England not in love with the Duchess of Devonshire. After Charlotte’s death the Duke sent for their daughter and her nurse, Mrs Gardner. It was not uncommon among aristocratic families for a husband’s illegitimate children to be brought up by his wife. Georgiana’s cousin Lady Pembroke was generous towards Lord Pembroke’s bastard children until he proposed giving them the Herbert name. Georgiana was in raptures at the prospect of adopting the girl. She met her for the first time on 8 May 1780 and told her mother:

she is a very healthy good humour’d looking child, I think, not very tall; she is amazingly like the Duke, I am sure you would have known her anywhere. She is the best humour’d little thing you ever saw, vastly active and vastly lively, she seems very affectionate and seems to like Mrs Gardner very much. She has not good teeth and has often the toothache, but I suppose that does not signify as she has not changed them yet, and she is the most nervous little thing in the world, the agitation of coming made her hands shake so, that they are scarcely recover’d today.³⁵

The Duke, Georgiana wrote, was also ‘vastly pleased’ with the little girl. Lady Spencer was baffled by her daughter’s excitement. ‘I hope you have not talk’d of her to people,’ she warned, ‘as that is taking it out of the Duke’s and your power to act as you shall hereafter choose about her.’ Georgiana was sending the wrong message to the Duke, she thought; she would do better to appear neutral about the child.³⁶ Georgiana ignored her advice; little Charlotte was all she had of her own to love, and she didn’t care where the girl came from. However, her gambling sharply increased just before Charlotte’s arrival and continued afterwards at the same level. ‘You say you play’d on Sunday night till two,’ wrote Lady Spencer in distress. ‘What did you do? I hope you are not meant by the beautiful Duchess who has taken to the gaming table and lost £2000. Pray, my dearest G. take care about play … and deserve to be what I doubt you are, whether you deserve it or not, the idol of my heart.’³⁷

Charlotte had no surname but Georgiana resisted any move which might alert the child to her irregular background. ‘We have not been able to fix on a name,’ she wrote to Lady Spencer, ‘but I think it will be William without the S if it will not look too peculiar.’³⁸ The usual practice was to use the father’s Christian name or, if he had several titles, one of his lesser ones, in the place of a surname. After much discussion they agreed on Williams instead and decided to present Charlotte as a distant, orphaned relation of the Spencers.

Meanwhile both George and Harriet became engaged. The twenty-two-year-old George confessed that he was ‘out of his senses’ over a certain Lady Lavinia Bingham.³⁹ Although Lavinia had no money of her own, and did not come from a particularly distinguished family – her father, Lord Lucan, was a mere Irish peer – the Spencers made no objection to the match. At first glance she seemed to be a good choice. She was pretty in a conventional way with blue eyes and fair hair, talkative, intelligent and possessed of a strong sense of propriety, which Lady Spencer applauded. Less obvious until later were her more unattractive traits: she was highly strung, vindictive, hypocritical and a calm liar who maintained a veneer of politeness to her in-laws while freely abusing them in conversation elsewhere. She was also neurotically jealous of anything which diverted George’s attention from herself and loathed Georgiana and Harriet. Georgiana tried not to show her misgivings even though she could sense Lavinia’s dislike. ‘My Dearest Dearest Dearest Brother,’ she wrote on 9 May 1780 after the announcement of their engagement. ‘Happiness, ’tho’ not to be had directly, is in store for you – That every hour, every minute of your life may be full of happiness is the sincere and fervent wish of my heart for it loves you dearly in the double character of friend and brother.’⁴⁰

Harriet’s engagement took place two months later, in July. She was now an attractive nineteen-year-old, tall like Georgiana, slim, and the image of Lord Spencer with his dark eyebrows and pale skin. She was quieter than her sister, more analytical and less prone to flights of fancy, and she still worshipped Georgiana with a devotion which bordered on fixation. Most people compared her unfavourably to Georgiana – a judgement Harriet had made little effort to correct since childhood. Yet on her own she revealed herself to be every bit as individual in her character: passionate, vulnerable, witty and intuitive. Georgiana had never shared her parents’ dismissal of her sister and now, ironically, it was Georgiana’s appreciation of her that was helping to show Harriet in a more glamorous light. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser put it neatly in saying that Harriet ‘never appeared to greater advantage than on Thursday at the Opera; without detracting from her ladyship’s good graces, part of this effect may be imputed to comparison – her sister, the Duchess not “being by”.’⁴¹

Her choice was the Duke of Devonshire’s cousin Frederick, Lord Duncannon, the eldest son of the Earl of Bessborough. She explained to her friends that ‘he was very sensible and good tempered and by marrying him she made no new connections, for now her sister’s and hers would be the same.’⁴² Georgiana was slightly surprised by her sister’s choice. Even though the Cavendishes had been pushing for the match she had not thought him the type of man to attract Harriet. He was quiet, not particularly good looking, and not even financially secure – his father was known to have mortgaged all his estates. Harriet admitted to her cousin that his proposal had come as a surprise; she had ‘not the least guess of [his regard] till the day papa told me, for from your letters I thought his coming to St James’s Place was merely on Miss Thynn’s account.’⁴³ She added sadly:

I wish I could have known him a little better first, but my dear Papa and Mama say that it will make them the happiest of creatures, and what would I not do to see them happy, to be sure the connections are the pleasantest that can be … when one is to choose a companion for life (what a dreadful sound that has) the inside and not the out is what one ought to look at, and I think from what I have heard of him, and the great attachment he professes to have for me, I have a better chance of being reasonably happy with him than with most people I know. But there are some things which frighten me sadly, he is so grave and I am so very giddy … I will not plague you any more with my jeremiads for I am very low, pray write to me.⁴⁴

Lord and Lady Spencer approved of the marriage because of the Cavendish connection, and probably influenced Harriet more than they realized, but they were also concerned about the couple’s financial situation. Harriet’s marriage portion of £20,000 went to pay off part of Lord Bessborough’s £30,000 debt. She would be left with a mere £400 a year pin money and £2,000 a year joint income with her husband.⁴⁵ Lady Spencer begged Georgiana not to lead her impressionable sister into bad habits, and above all, to keep her away from the Devonshire set. ‘I am sure I need not assure you of my doing everything in the world (should this take place) to prevent her falling into either extravagance or dissipation,’ she promised.⁴⁶

Georgiana was confident that if she could reform her own life, protecting Harriet would be simple. Since her return from Coxheath she had sought to impress Fox and the other Whig leaders with her political understanding. She followed the debates in parliament, never missing an opportunity to discuss their implications at party dinners. Only a short time before people had described her as a novice: ‘I have also some hopes that she will turn Politician too,’ remarked a family friend in 1775, ‘for she gave me an account of some of the speeches in the House of Lords, Ld Grove made an odd one, and the Bishop of Peterborough a prodigious good one, only she said it was rather too much like Preaching.’ As an afterthought the friend added, ‘She must have heard all this from the Duke.’⁴⁷ No doubt it was true then, but Georgiana soon became sufficiently well informed to have her own opinions about political debates. She had also perfected the skills required of a political hostess: her dinners at Devonshire House served a useful purpose: waverers could be kept in line and supporters rewarded. She had also learned how to extract information without betraying any secrets in return. She knew when to appear knowledgeable and when to appear ignorant.

Georgiana absorbed the minutiae of party politics. To an outsider the House of Commons was an inchoate system of temporary factions and alliances. In reality, the 558 MPs could be divided into three broad categories. The largest, with 185 or so members, was the ‘King’s Men’ or the court interest. These were MPs who received patronage from the crown and could therefore be relied upon to support any Prime Minister who had the confidence of the King.⁴⁸ The second group was made up of career politicians – some of whom, like Edmund Burke and James Hare, depended upon patrons – who regarded politics as an end in itself. The third and smallest category was the ‘Independents’, men who owed allegiance to no one and regarded themselves as above party politics. In fact they generally supported the government and only on very rare occasions voted with the opposition. In the House of Lords the court interest, known in the upper house as the ‘King’s Friends’, accounted for more than half the 150 peers, which made it impossible for the opposition Whigs to win any debate on numbers alone.

Among the career politicians there were, indeed, factions and alliances, named after the men who lead them – Shelburnite, Northite and Rockinghamite. The labels Whig and Tory, as applied to two distinct parties, only came into official use in the early nineteenth century. The idea of an organized opposition was not acceptable in the eighteenth century – any party which opposed the King was, in theory, committing treason. On the other hand, although opposition was regarded as the exception to good government rather than the rule, since 1688 the Commons had prided itself on its independence from the crown. Peers and MPs regarded it as their duty to be both servants to the crown and defenders of the constitution. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England Mr Justice Blackstone described the constitution as a framework of checks and balances: ‘In the legislature, the people are a check upon the nobility and the nobility a check upon the people; by the mutual privilege of rejecting what the other has resolved: while the King is a check upon both, which preserves the executive power from encroachment. And this very executive power is again checked, and kept within bounds by the two houses …’⁴⁹

The Whigs had to be careful not to appear dangerous or disloyal. Edmund Burke spent much of his time defending the party against such charges by arguing that they were challenging the King in order to safeguard the victories of the Glorious Revolution. Even though the old Tory party was defunct, the Whigs used the name as a term of abuse against North’s ministry because of its reputation as the party of the King. Since the Whigs accused George III of increasing the influence of the crown at the expense of civil liberty, it suited them to call their opponents ‘Tories’. In fact the King was doing no such thing, and Lord North and the other men in government did not have the least shred of Tory sympathies, but the opposition Whigs liked to portray themselves as the true Whigs, martyred for their beliefs by the forces of tyranny.

Georgiana fervently believed this to be the case even if some members of the opposition were rather more cynical. When she wore the adopted Whig colours of blue and buff (taken from the colours of the American army) she did so out of conviction and expected her friends to do the same. It was precisely because she was a fervent believer that she was able to carry off her military uniforms and women’s auxiliary corps at Coxheath without being ridiculed. She had become one of the party’s best-known representatives. Fox was the first to recognize her talent for propaganda – they shared a flair for the public aspect of politics. They understood, for example, the potency of symbols in raising or lowering morale, in attracting or repelling support.

Fox encouraged Georgiana to play a greater role in increasing the party’s public presence. As a result, in January 1780 she failed to appear at court for the annual celebration of the Queen’s birthday. Society and the press remarked upon her absence. It was the first time she had shunned the court and people read it as a sign of the Whigs’ confidence that they would soon drive Lord North from office. When parliament reconvened on 8 February the government was beset by a number of crises. Not only was the war going badly; there was unrest in Ireland and a widespread fear that it might follow the example of America and declare independence. There was also popular discontent at home, fuelled by the Whigs, and hundreds of petitions poured in from around the country demanding democratic reform of the parliamentary system.

The session began promisingly enough. Prodded by the Whigs, the Duke of Devonshire at last gave his maiden speech in the Lords on 17 March. Edmund Burke congratulated Georgiana, saying with more hope than conviction, ‘it will become, by habit, more disagreeable to him to continue silent on an interesting occasion than hitherto it has been to him, to speak upon it.’⁵⁰ Burke was leading the assault on North and the big push came in the shape of his Economical Reform Bill, which aimed to limit the crown’s powers by reducing the number of pensions and sincecures on the Civil List. The government defeated all but one of his proposals but at the expense of alienating backbenchers and independents by its heavy-handed methods of ensuring compliance.

On 6 April 1780 the Whigs ambushed North with a surprise resolution. John Dunning, a lawyer MP who had honed his rhetorical technique at the Inns of Court, rose to give a speech. His allegiance was well known and he began, as expected, by condemning the government’s quashing of the Economical Reform Bill. But then, with clear and precise logic he pointed out that over 100,000 people had petitioned parliament for change, and that the government’s response was merely to crush it. He paused theatrically, holding the House in rapt attention, before, his voice rising to a crescendo, he urged the following resolution: ‘The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ The House was electrified; MPs jumped from their seats and waved their order papers at him. The vote was 233 to 215 in favour. Westminster was in pandemonium and the government thrown into confusion.

North’s immediate response was to tender his resignation, but George III insisted that he remain in office. The Speaker fell ill, preventing the Commons from meeting for a week, and Georgiana feared that the delay would cost them votes. ‘Lord Westmoreland [sic] as much as told me he should vote with North on Tuesday,’ she recorded.⁵¹ When the Commons met again her presentiment proved correct. Dunning was overconfident and called for parliament to remain sitting until the changes demanded in the petitions had been implemented. This was too radical for the independent MPs, who voted against the resolution. The Whigs reacted bitterly: Dunning had thrown away their advantage. Fox approached him after the debate and advised him ‘to make no more motions’.⁵² ‘We were sadly beat last night in the House of Commons,’ Georgiana informed Lady Spencer; ‘the ministry people are all in great spirits.’⁵³

A few weeks later she reported, ‘We go on vilely indeed in the House of Commons.’⁵⁴ Her friend Lord Camden concurred: ‘Our popular exertions are dying away, and the country returning to its old state of lukewarm indifference, the Minority in the House of Commons dwindle every day, and the Opposition is at variance with itself.’⁵⁵ But there was one piece of good news. The eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future George IV, had allied himself with the Whigs. His support, as the heir apparent to the throne, absolved them of the charge of disloyalty to the crown, which made it easier for them to attack the King.

In supporting the Whigs against his father the Prince was following an established tradition among the Hanoverians. From George I onwards, father and son had hated each other. Each successive Prince of Wales had thrown in his lot with the opposition, and the future George IV was no different from his predecessors. He feared and resented his parents while they despised him as weak, duplicitous and lazy. Georgiana recorded her first impressions of him in a scrapbook, which she entitled ‘Annecdotes Concerning HRH the Prince of Wales’. Knowing that the memoir would only be seen by future generations she was absolutely candid in her opinion of him:

The Prince of Wales is rather tall, and has a figure which, though striking is not perfect. He is inclined to be too fat and looks too much like a woman in men’s cloaths, but the gracefulness of his manner and his height certainly make him a pleasing figure. His face is very handsome, and he is fond of dress even to a tawdry degree, which young as he is will soon wear off. His person, his dress and the admiration he has met with … take up his thoughts chiefly. He is good-natured and rather extravagant … but he certainly does not want for understanding, and his jokes sometimes have the appearance of wit. He appears to have an inclination to meddle with politics – he loves being of consequence, and whether it is in intrigues of state or of gallantry he often thinks more is intended than really is.⁵⁶

He was clever, well read, and possessed of exquisite taste in art and decoration, but he was wholly deficient in self-knowledge. Following the King’s orders the Prince had been isolated from companions of his own age and tutored by dry old men who saw to it that his life was one long regime of worthy activities. But instead of creating a paragon of virtue, the Prince’s strict and joyless upbringing had made him vain, petulant and attention-seeking. As soon as he could he rebelled against everything he had been taught. The King relaxed the cordon sanitaire around the Prince when he turned eighteen only to the extent of holding a few private balls for him, ‘from which I and many others were banished,’ wrote Georgiana, ‘as no opposition person was asked’ – which only increased his desire to mix with people who did not meet with his parents’ approval.

‘As he only went out in secret, or with the King and Queen,’ she also recorded, ‘he formed very few connections with any other woman other than women of the town.’ On his first trip to Drury Lane in 1779 he saw The Winter’s Tale, and immediately fell in love with the twenty-one-year-old actress Mary Robinson, a protégé of Georgiana’s. She was delighted to conduct a very public affair with him, and even went so far as to emblazon a simulacrum of his crest – three feathers – on her carriage. The Prince foolishly wrote her explicit letters, in which he called her ‘Perdita’ – her role in the play – and signed himself ‘Florize’. Like any astute woman on the make, she kept his adolescent declarations – he promised her a fortune as soon as he came of age – and blackmailed him when he grew tired of her.

It was during the Prince’s visits to Drury Lane that he first came into contact with the Devonshire House Circle, and in particular with Georgiana and Fox. George III blamed Fox for deliberately and calculatingly debauching his son, but he had no malicious intent. The Prince had already started to drink and gamble before he met Fox, who simply showed him how to do it in a more refined way. The Prince worshipped Fox who, for his part, genuinely liked the boy, despite the thirteen-year age gap, seeing in him, perhaps, something of his younger, reckless self. The two made an unlikely pair, one of them dressed in exquisite finery, the other unwashed, unshaven, his clothes askew and his linen soiled. On most nights they could be found either at Brooks’s or Devonshire House, playing faro until they fell asleep at the table.

The Prince’s marked attentions to Georgiana, the fact that he constantly sought her advice on every matter – from his clothes to his relations with his father – fanned rumours that they were having an affair. Nathaniel Wraxall was loath to characterize it definitely, and ventured no further than saying, ‘of what nature was that attachment, and what limits were affixed to it by the Duchess, must remain a matter of conjecture’.⁵⁷ The Prince was almost certainly in love with Georgiana, but she never reciprocated his feelings. Throughout their lives they always addressed each other as ‘my dearest brother’ and ‘sister’, although the Prince was often madly jealous of rivals.⁵⁸ It was his lack of success with Georgiana, when every other woman in Whig society (including, it was rumoured, Harriet) was his for the asking, that made her so irresistible to him.

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

Georgiana’s emotional state disturbed Lady Spencer, who feared it might induce a miscarriage. She told Harriet she was sure the ones she herself had suffered as a young woman had been caused by an ‘agitation of spirits’.³⁴ But she had neither the sensitivity nor the imagination to understand that Bess might be the cause of her daughter’s torment, and her advice to Georgiana was limited to the practical. Firstly she suggested that Georgiana should stay at home; otherwise she would be accused of loving parties ‘better than a child’.³⁵ Secondly she recommended laudanum; ‘take a few drops (5 or 6) … if you feel any violent [attacks] or agitation … be assured whatever may happen this time, your health is much improved in the main, that if you can but contrive by any means this winter, to keep your mind and body in a calm and quiet state, I have no doubt of your soon obtaining all you wish … do not make yourself unhappy.’³⁶ Finally, as usual, disturbed by Georgiana’s fear that she was too sinful to take the Sacrament, she urged her to put her trust in God. She enlisted Harriet’s help in persuading Georgiana that it was ‘not necessary to be too scrupulous about what is past – the merits of the Saviour are more than sufficient to atone for the blackest of crimes, of which she certainly has none to reproach herself with’.³⁷

Bess was due to pack her bags and leave for France on 25 December. The Devonshires had officially engaged her to be Charlotte Williams’s governess at £300 a year and she was to take her pupil abroad for the winter. The plan had a neatness to it which pleased everyone. It solved the problem of Charlotte, who had not thrived with Mrs Gardner, offered hope for Bess’s health, and provided her with an income. The Duke was firmly convinced that only the warm conditions of the south of France would cure Bess’s terrible cough. There may have been other reasons for Bess going away.* She begged Georgiana and the Duke to keep her informed of ‘the stories you hear of me, pray communicate to me that at least I may be justified to you, and that you may know truth from falsehood’. The threat of some scandal would explain why she was sent abroad for so long when the friendship was in its early stages.

Georgiana was distraught at her departure. ‘I am to lose my dear little Bess and my dear Little Charlotte tomorrow,’ she wrote. ‘It will do them so much good that I don’t allow myself to be much vex’d. But I shall miss them both very much.’³⁸ Lady Spencer hoped, as much as Bess feared, that the separation would mean the end of her reign over the Devonshires. But neither reckoned on the strength of Georgiana’s attachment. ‘My dearest, dearest, dearest Bess, my lovely friend,’ she wrote in a letter accompanying a box stuffed with gifts. ‘If I am mistaken and that you are grown “Ah te voilà ma petite” to your G. throw this into the sea. Mais non c’est impossible, pardonnez moi, mon ange, Je crois que je vous dis quelquefois des brutalités pour avoir le bonheur de m’entendre contredire.’†³⁹ Bess’s mother, Lady Bristol, informed her daughter that Georgiana had written and visited several times just to talk to her. ‘You have done well, most certainly,’ she congratulated, ‘to leave your interest in her hands.’⁴⁰

* She was referring to Bess’s grandfather Lord Hervey, who died before he could become the second Earl of Bristol. Despite suffering from severe epilepsy and general ill-health, Lord Hervey was, for a time, a brilliantly successful courtier. He recorded his career in the witty and scabrous Memoirs of George II, which was published after his death. Although he married the clever and beautiful Molly Lepel, his real love was for Stephen Fox, Charles Fox’s uncle. The poet Alexander Pope wrote a vicious poem about him: ‘Amphibious thing! that acting either part,/ The Trifling head, or the corrupted heart/ Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,/ Now trips a lady, now struts a lord …’

†George, the eldest son of Lord Hervey, died unmarried. His second son, Augustus, who became the third Earl of Bristol, did so in a blaze of scandal. Many years before he had secretly married Elizabeth Chudleigh, a rambunctious lady-in-waiting at court with ambition and a reputation to match. The alliance was short-lived and both of them agreed to maintain the pretence of there never having been a marriage. Elizabeth then married the Duke of Kingston, who knew nothing of her previous life, but after the Duke died her past was exposed in a court case over the will. The Countess-Duchess – as Horace Walpole called her – was tried for bigamy in the House of Lords in 1776 in front of 6,000 spectators. One of the many peeresses who crammed into the gallery during the lengthy trial was Georgiana. Because of her age and status, the Duchess of Kingston escaped branding on the hand, the usual punishment, and was allowed to retire abroad. Augustus was condemned for conniving in the deception and his punishment was severe: the Lords insisted the original marriage was indissoluble, thus depriving him of legitimate heirs.

* There is also a vague hint in surviving letters that Bess had become, or contemplated becoming, the mistress of that great seducer the Duke of Dorset. The clues come from gossip repeated by Lady George Cavendish, who baldly stated that Bess had an affair with Dorset, but also from some little admissions in Bess’s own letters. In one fragment she refers to her separation from Mr Foster and that she told him, ‘I never would quit him in any misfortune – it was after all that, that he went down to Ickworth and my mother would not see him. Yet I think I should not have answered at all, but to deny the thing.’ She does not say what she should have denied to Mr Foster, except that they were ‘imprudencies, which though no cause of my separation were subjects of blame’. Chatsworth 532.4: Bess to GD, circa Sept. 1783.

†But that is not possible. Forgive me, my angel. I believe I say these terrible things merely in order to hear them contradicted.

7An Unstable Coalition1783

Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire has determined not to appear in public till after her lying-in; as she had long been leader of the fashion, we hope the ladies will follow her example, and get into the straw as fast as possible.

Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 8 February 1783

ONCE BESS had set sail on the packet to France, enriched with money, new clothes and a letter of introduction to the Polignacs, Georgiana was free to resume her former activities. Her long absence from London during 1782 had reduced her to the role of spectator of most of the developments affecting the Whigs. Defying reports by the Morning Herald and other newspapers that she would withdraw from public life until the end of her pregnancy, Georgiana now re-established herself as Fox’s ally and political confidante. He frequently stopped by Devonshire House to discuss his worries. The strain he was under showed in his bloodshot eyes and in the weight he had put on since the previous summer. ‘He says ev’ry body is grown fat even Mr Hare,’ Georgiana replied to her mother’s enquiry; ‘and that the people who are said to be thin are only call’d so because they have not increas’d with the rest of the world.’¹

The Rockingham – Shelburne Coalition had been in trouble from the beginning. George III would only talk to Lord Shelburne and pointedly ignored all the Whigs’ requests for patronage. As early as June 1782 some Whigs were already condemning the Coalition as unworkable. Then Lord Rockingham came down with the flu; within two weeks he was dead. He had been in office for just three months, after almost two decades in opposition. The Duke of Portland took over as the official head of the party, while Fox remained the heir apparent. Rockingham’s death further exposed the deep fissures in the cabinet between his supporters and those of Lord Shelburne. Fox had been on the point of resigning his post as Foreign Secretary when Rockingham died. On 4 July he surrendered his seal of office. Lord John Cavendish, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, followed – along with most of the Whigs. But many thought that Fox was wrong to give up so quickly. It took a nine-hour meeting at Lord Fitzwilliam’s before he was able to persuade his supporters that he had not made a terrible mistake.

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