The Duchess

by Amanda Foreman

  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 fee-paying balls and nightly concerts. 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 June 1 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 involved 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 their 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 September 30 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 October 19 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 conte
ntedly, “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 October 29:

  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: