The Duchess

by Amanda Foreman

  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 cosseted 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 ($297,000 in today’s money) when her pin money, the allowance granted to her by the Duke, 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.

  CHAPTER 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, September 4, 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, July 4, 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 exclusive circle of 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. Among the older group was the philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke, whose legacy to conservative political ideology remains strong in America and Britain. He was the first conservative thinker to recognize that the State has a duty to safeguard the political and religious freedoms of its citizens, which was one of the reasons why he supported the American colonists against the British government. Burke rarely went to Georgiana’s parties 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 balcony 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 muc
h 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.”