In July 1785 both wife and mistress gave birth, within a few weeks of each other. The Duchess's little girl was called Harriet and was born in the comfort of Devonshire House. (There was a previous daughter called Georgiana, born in 1783.) Lady Elizabeth's accouchement was squalid by comparison. Even the Devonshire House set could not risk the obloquy of the world by allowing the Duke's illegitimate daughter, as well as his legitimate one, to be born in his house in the same month. So Lady Elizabeth was packed off to Italy, where her little girl was brought into the world by a back- street amateur. She describes the scene in her diary: "Imagine a little staircase, dark and dirty, leading to the apartments of these people. The family consisted of the Archi-Pretre des Amoureux; his woman-servant, a coarse, ugly and filthy creature, the doctor and his wife . . . everything that one can imagine of wicked, vulgar and horrible ... I had to dine with him, and to endure the odious company of these people; I had to live in a house which was little better than a house of ill fame."20 The girl was called Caroline St Jules, and when she came to London with her mother to take up her place in the nursery at Devonshire House she was passed off as the daughter of a French nobleman whom Lady Elizabeth and the Duchess had agreed to look after. One cannot be sure how many people were fooled, but the story grew increasingly thin with time, and with further additions to that strange nursery. Caroline grew up to marry George Lamb, brother of William Lamb, so that she too, was "Lady Caroline Lamb" as well as Lady Bessborough's daughter, who had married William Lamb. To differentiate the two, they were known as "Caro William" and "Caro George".
Three years later, Lady Elizabeth again went on her travels, this time to Rouen, to give birth to the Duke's son, whom they called Augustus Clifford (Clifford had been a title borne by the Duke's mother). Lady Elizabeth had what appears to us the cool effrontery to write to her dear friend the Duchess with the wish that she, Georgiana, may have a boy too. "Erring as I have been," she writes, "yet my heart can feel nothing but tenderness and joy at the sight of this dear child - I only wish now that my dear friend had a son also."21
Georgiana gave birth to a son and heir in 1790, the Marquess of Hartington, known as "Hart", who as a young man was desperately in love with his cousin Lady Caroline Lamb (i.e. Caro William); he was subsequently the 6th Duke of Devonshire. To make the matter even more complex, the Duke had another daughter by a third woman, and this girl was called Charlotte. Georgiana, too, had her obligatory visit to the continent, to give birth to her daughter by Charles Grey in 1791, a girl who was given the name Eliza Courtney. The Duchess was banished from England for two years as a result of this indiscretion (or "scrape", as she would call it), but was welcomed home by the Duke in 1793 to resume the round of pleasurable living. Half a century later, Greville wrote that "the private (for secret it never was) history of Devonshire House would be very curious and amusing as a scandalous chronicle, an exhibition of vice in its most refined and attractive form, full of grace, dignity and splendour, but I fancy full of misery and sorrow also".22
Greville was writing at a time in the social history of England when a moral stance took the place of decent behaviour, and when it was no longer possible to understand the curious morality which allowed the Devonshire House arrangement to work. He may well think that such debauchery must bring misery and sorrow, but he would be wrong. However freely they bestowed their emotions, the Devonshire trio were honourable towards each other, and far more "moral" in their behaviour to each other and to other human beings than the constrained, frustrated Victorians could ever hope to be. It was moral, for example, that the various children of these liaisons should each receive the parental affection that was their due. Jealousy, envy, hatred, were unknown to them. Their instincts were decent.
Greville was also denied the perusal of letters which passed between wife and mistress, and which would have made his eyes blink in incomprehension. Georgiana called her husband's mistress "my dearest, dearest, dearest Bess, my lovely friend ... my angel love", and she signs herself, "your idolizing G". In January 1784 she wrotes: "I am gulchy, gulchy when I reflect at the length of time that is elapsed since we first knew one another here, at the length of time since I have lost you and at the distance to our meeting, but I comfort myself by thinking what a sacredness all this gives to our friendship. Thank God, we have now been long enough united not to blush at the short period of our friendship. Dr Dr Dr Bess, you grow every day more and more Canis's* sister and yr Georgine's friend . . . you my love, are Canis's child's guardian angel, his and my benefactress." When she confesses to Bess that she is deep in shameful debt, she begs her: "My angel Bess, write to me, tell me you don't hate me for this confession, oh, love, love, love me ever."23
Before anyone should wonder, in this age when our sensibilities are smothered by psycho-analysis, I suppose one ought to point out that there was no trace of a lesbian relationship between the two women. It was common form to address one's friend as "dearest love"; people were less ashamed of emotion than they are now, and they valued attachments. Brothers used terms of affection when addressing their sisters that would now seem excessive. Bess was no doubt right to say that the friendship she had with the Duchess was stronger "than perhaps ever united two people".24 It certainly survived all the minor infidelities of love-making, and both Georgiana and Bess loved the Duke without feeling that they had therefore to hate each other.
Georgiana's decline into middle age was rapid, owing to the pace of her life, and the pills which she took to sustain her in it. Lady Holland described her in 1799, when she was only forty-two, as "painful to see; scarcely has she a vestige of those charms that once attracted all hearts. Her figure is corpulent, her complexion coarse, one eye gone, and her neck immense."25 She had suffered torments with an infection of the eye, for which the medical attentions of the day were inadequate. She was prescribed an application of three spoonfuls of water mixed with two of brandy and one of vinegar, which all but ruined her sight completely. A handkerchief was tied around her neck to force all the blood into her head, and then leeches were applied to her eye to bleed it. Not surprisingly (to us) the eye became ulcerated and grew to the size of a grapefruit. She then changed to bathing it in warm milk, but it was too late. She fell back on laudanum to relieve the pain.
* "Canis" was the Duke. "Racky" was Bess, and "The Rat" was Georgiana.
Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire died in 1806 aged forty-eight, and with her died a brilliant epoch. Her friend Bess was distraught with grief. Her sister Lady Bessborough wrote : "Anything so horrible, so killing as her three days' agony no human being ever witnessed. I saw it all, held her thro' all her struggles, saw her expire, and since have again and again kiss'd her cold lips and press'd her lifeless body to my heart, and yet I am alive."26 Not having known her, we cannot judge how given to exaggeration her obituarists might have been, but one of them writes with the ring of conviction when he says, "never, we will venture to say, was the death of any human being more universally lamented than hers will be."27
With her died also that wonderful gift of affection possessed by the whole Devonshire House set. The next generation was much less generous of heart. Georgiana's children turned on Bess, who continued to live with the Duke and grow old with him, and one of them, Harriet, known as Harryo, nursed an implacable hatred of her. When, three years later, the Duke took the only honourable and logical course by making Bess his second duchess, the children, now grown-up, were outraged. But the Duke first wrote a warm and eloquent letter to his mother-in-law Lady Spencer advising her of his intention.28
The marriage lasted only two years, for the Duke died in 1811, though Bess's love for him continued beyond the grave. The children were quite insensitive, and Hart, now the new duke, ordered her to leave Devonshire House a week later. She spent her last years in exile in Rome, where she gathered around her a coterie of eminent people of culture, and where she died in 1824. Hart, by this time reconciled, had her body brought back to England, where it lay in state a
t Devonshire House, before being buried in the Cavendish vault at Derby, alongside her beloved duke and her beloved friend, Georgiana. Georgiana's son, Hart, the 6th Duke of Devonshire (1790-1858), led a life which was supremely characteristic of a Cavendish - undemonstrative, unnoticed, and comfortable. In common with his ancestors, he was a man of much ability, which he never used. His talents lay neglected, for want of the energy to make them blossom. In his case, the habits of timidity and reserve were compounded by an incurable deafness, which showed itself in childhood and persisted throughout his life. As a result of this, he never spoke in the House of Lords, though he conscientiously sat there and gave his vote. His tastes were literary, being a member of the Roxburghe Club, and he devoted much attention to his library at Chatsworth, to which he added many volumes bought from the Duke of Roxburghe's collection. A true Cavendish, his library was his home. Also like a Cavendish, his hospitality was lavish. Though he may have preferred solitude, he saw it as his duty to entertain and to share his various homes. In his lights, it would have been immoral to live alone in a grand house, so he suffered what must have been torment for him, to be surrounded by forty people at dinner every day, talking in a cacophony of sound which he could not unscramble into words.
Though he took no active part in political life, he was powerful enough by virtue of his name and possessions to be indifferent to status. He was known to decline a royal command, almost an unheard-of snub, because he had a party that evening at Chiswick which had been arranged long before.29 Hart would not regard this as anything but simple truth. It was not within him to be insulting or calculating.
The one passion of his life, conceived in childhood and subdued in maturity, was his affection for his bewitching cousin, Lady Caroline Lamb, to whom he signed himself "Devilshire". Theirs was a puppy love grown into devotion, the letters between them full of eloquent endearments. The Duke did not marry, however; he was sometimes called the Bachelor Duke. No doubt his deafness made him uncertain in female company. His affaires amoureuses were reserved for Paris.
His fame rests not on an achievement of his, but on the achievements of his protege, Sir Joseph Paxton. Were it not for Devonshire, Paxton may not have been discovered. Mr Paxton, a young man in his early twenties, was employed on the Duke's estate at Chatsworth as a gardener. The Duke recognised his special talents, and encouraged him to give them expression; he commissioned Paxton to build at Chatsworth a giant conservatory, 300 feet long by 145 feet wide, by 60 feet high, covering in all one acre. This unique construction soon attracted the world's notice to the young gardener, whose career culminated in the Crystal Palace built for the Exhibition of 1851, a vast glass building placed in Hyde Park, modelled to an extent on the conservatory at Chatsworth, and which now has a suburb of London named after it. Paxton and the Duke remained close friends all their lives, the one a brilliant worldly success, the other a disappointed and unhappy man. "I had rather all those plants were dead than have you ill", the Duke wrote to Paxton in 1835. "He is more kind to me than you can possibly imagine", said Paxton.30 In a way, the Duke enjoyed Paxton's achievements by proxy.
He was succeeded by a distant cousin, the 7th Duke of Devonshire (1808-1891), who had been a member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, a clever scholar with a scientific bent, and was subsequently Chancellor of the Universities of London and Cambridge. He liked being at Hardwick Hall because he could lead a more private life there. He married a grand-daughter of the 5th Duke, thus knitting the family together again, and was succeeded by his son Spencer Compton Cavendish (the first in the line not to be called William Cavendish after the founder of the family fortune), 8th Duke of Devonshire (1833-1908). For most of his life this man was Marquess of Hartington, coming to the dukedom at the age of fifty-eight, so it is by his nickname of "Harty-tarty" that the memory of him lingers.
Harty-tarty holds a place in the history of nineteenth-century politics far in excess of his achievements, by virtue of his solid common sense. He held many political offices, but grew to dislike them, and three times he refused to be Prime Minister. For forty years he was in and out of the Cabinet. He distrusted rhetoric and insincerity, of which he found all too much evidence in political life. His own mind worked slowly. He was not quick-witted, not eloquent, not amusing, not engaging, but he was a first-rate administrator, and had deep convictions, which he never compromised. Harty-tarty was boring, but right. Members would put up with his Interminable factual speeches, delivered without a glint of humour or relief of phrase, because they knew he was more conscientious than anyone else, and had better judgement. Margot Asquith said that his speaking "was the finest example of pile-driving the world has ever seen". He himself knew how boring and laborious he was. He once yawned in the middle of a speech in the House, and apologised by explaining that what he was saying was "so damned dull".31 Dutifully, Harty-tarty invited large numbers of house-guests to Chats- worth, but could rarely remember who they were. More than once there were nearly 500 people, including servants, staying in the house. He was a casual, easy-going man, impossible to impress. One of his guests wandered over to Pevensey Castle, a romantic ruin which belonged to the Duke[6] At dinner, the Duke asked him where he had been, and the guest said how impressed he had been with Pevensey Castle. "Pevensey?" said the Duke, to whom the name rang a bell. "Whose is Pevensey?"32Such a casual attitude to wealth and possessions carried its own charm. Just as it was impossible to impress the Duke, so he never sought to impress anyone else. Status-seeking was trivial to him, but if you had status already, it was equally trivial not to use it. One of his father's agents was disquieted by the amount of money which Harty-tarty was spending, and conveyed his concern to the Duke who could not understand what all the fuss was about. "Well," he said,' 'isn't there plenty of it?"
Harty-tarty was not ambitious; he had nothing to be ambitious for. He did not know the feeling of enthusiasm in anything. He was reported to have said that the happiest moment in- his life was when his pig took first prize at an agricultural show. Whatever he said or did was based on principle, not gain or expediency. He had more probity and common sense, and was known to have them, than any of his contemporaries. Hence his enormous influence. "I don't know why it is," he said, "but whenever a man is caught cheating at cards the case is referred to me." However lightweight the remark, it shows that the Duke was reputed incorruptible, because he was above reward.
Margot Asquith has left us the best pen-portrait of this Duke. He was, she wrote, "a man whose like we shall never see again; he stood by himself and could have come from no country in the world but England. He had the figure and appearance of an artisan, with the brevity of a peasant, the courtesy of a king and the noisy sense of humour of a Falstaff . . . possessed of endless wisdom. He was perfectly disengaged from himself, fearlessly truthful, and without pettiness of any kind."33
As he grew older, Harty-tarty's constitutional somnolence became worse. He would fall asleep at dinner, during a speech, or at the top of the stairs. He fell asleep once in the House of Lords, woke up with a start, looked at the clock, and said, "Good heavens! What a bore! I shan't be in bed for another seven hours." On another occasion, he said, "I had a horrid nightmare. I dreamed I was making a speech in the House of Lords, and I woke up and found I was actually doing so."34 His last remark, as he lay dying, was typical of the man. "Well," he said, "the game is over, and I'm not sorry."35
A game, indeed, it had been, and played with a finesse which only the Victorians could master. For this upright, thoughtful and straightforward man had for thirty years been having a discreet, but not secret, affair with the Duchess of Manchester.
The Duchess of Manchester, afterwards Duchess of Devonshire, was a German aristocrat by birth - Countess Louise von Alten. It was said that nobody could understand how beautiful a woman could be unless they had seen the Duchess of Manchester at thirty. She quickly became the leader of the "fast set" in London (as opposed to the more sedentary "Victorian
" set), gambled and danced the days and nights away. She bore the Duke of Manchester five children but her one true love was Harty-tarty, to whom she was devoted. They always addressed each other formally in public, by their titles. No whisper of scandal was allowed to follow them; they were scrupulously correct.
Louise was a remorseless lady of ambition. It was she who pushed Harrington into the position of influence which he held. She wanted desperately for him to be Prime Minister, and he, of course, did not give it a thought. They made an odd couple of conflicting elements, he sluggish and contented, she powerfully imperious. She had something of the "unswerving relentlessness of a steam-roller about her, neither kindly nor unkindly, but crushing its way on, and flattening out the unevennesses of the road it intended to traverse". She prodded and drove him. Fortunately, he was possessed of such a large measure of common sense, that he did not allow himself to be influenced by her. As E. F. Benson has put it, "It was largely she who made him use his weight; he could use it equally well sitting down."38
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