The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  11. Duchess of Devonshire, Empress of Style

  The first Countess Spencer gave her Christian name to her eldest daughter. Born in June 1757, young Georgiana was destined to become one of the most famous figures of late eighteenth-century English society, being noted for her style, charm and magnetism. Horace Walpole encapsulated her special gifts, when he wrote: ‘She effaces all without being a beauty; but her youthful figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty, and modest familiarity, make her a phenomenon.’

  Georgiana’s life was governed by the conflicting tensions of glamour, addiction, controversy and tragedy. Infectious in her enthusiasm for life, driven in her political beliefs, she was also prey to weaknesses which she proved incapable of overcoming, even when she recognized them in herself. Having enough self-knowledge to identify her faults, but insufficient resolve to correct or eliminate them, she found deep unhappiness in her own state — unhappiness that she consistently transmitted to those around her.

  At Althorp there is a beautiful portrait of the three adult children of the First Earl and Countess Spencer by Angelica Kauffmann. To the right stands George John, the middle in age, his bright red hair swept back, looking down at his two pretty sisters, seated together, in sumptuous dresses, their hands clasped devotedly. The central figure is Lady Harriet Spencer, the youngest of the three, her left arm gently placed around Georgiana’s shoulders; and it is to Georgiana that the eye is inextricably drawn. She sits there so arrestingly, without actually being beautiful, toying with a string of pearls, and looking out of the canvas with an expression of freshness, intelligence and extreme vulnerability.

  Other portraits of her at Althorp are similarly captivating. Both Reynolds and Gainsborough painted her as a little girl, and I have placed the pictures next to one another in the South Drawing Room, because they show how the two great portrait painters of the time viewed their sitter: Reynolds has her as a slightly chubby, deeply angelic, sweet and unthreatening child presence, standing on a table, eyes level with those of her doting mother; whereas Gainsborough, with sharper lines all round, shows a highly intuitive old soul, captured in a girl’s body, knowledge beyond her years blazing from feline eyes.

  I believe Reynolds’s and Kauffmann’s portraits have proved to be the most accurate projections of Georgiana’s essential spirit. There was something deeply childlike about her; and also something fundamentally fragile. It was the outward attractiveness of Georgiana, her physical appeal, combined with the refreshing energy of her character, which marked her out for singular attention both from her contemporaries and from the burgeoning press of her time. It also lay at the root of the unhappiness that would be the dominant theme of her life.

  As Georgiana was the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the kingdom, her hand in marriage was among the most highly prized in the country. However, recognizing their daughter’s impetuosity and relative immaturity of character, the Spencers were keen to spare Georgiana from too early a marriage. But she was wilful enough to ignore their advice.

  As early as January 1772, there was speculation linking her to one of the richest young men in the land. Mrs Delaney, who always liked to be up to date on such matters, wrote to the Reverend John Dewes:

  Many weddings are talked of, but so often contradicted, I am afraid of naming them; it is ‘thought there is a future scheme under consideration for a union between the Duke of Devonshire and Lady Georgiana Spencer.’ I think that paragraph would make a figure in a newspaper, and just in that style!

  Two years later, Mrs Delaney’s prediction came true, Georgiana’s mother writing to Viscount Nuneham, in April 1774:

  Nothing but the incessant hurry I have lived in for several weeks could have prevented my writing sooner to inform you of Georgiana’s intended marriage with the Duke of Devonshire. You will have heard of it from others, but what you cannot hear so well as from myself, is that it is really a match of inclination, which makes it infinitely more satisfactory to us than his riches or rank could have done ... She had several very great offers, but gave the preference without hesitation to the Duke of Devonshire, and seems perfectly satisfied with the choice she has made, which indeed we have great reason to believe is a very good one.

  A month later, perhaps with more honesty, Countess Spencer wrote to Mrs Henry:

  I had flattered myself I should have had more time to have improved 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.

  Public interest in the match was so intense that, rather than marrying on the appointed day — Georgiana’s seventeenth birthday — the couple secretly brought matters forward by forty-eight hours. Perhaps partially inspired by the romance of her own parents’ secret wedding, as well as by fear that the ceremony would lose dignity through the curiosity of so many, Georgiana agreed to the change of plan. Her cousin, Charles Poyntz, officiated at the ceremony.

  Mrs Delaney had seen too many such unions, not to be able to detect underlying difficulties:

  It was as great a secret to Lady Ga. Spencer as to the world. Sunday morning she was told her doom; she went out of town (to Wimbledon) early on Sunday, and they were married at Wimbledon church ... as quietly and uncrowded as if John and Joan had tied the Gordian Knot. Don’t think because I have made use of the word ‘doom’ that it was a melancholy sentence (though a surprise) to the young lady; for she is so peculiarly happy as to think his Grace very agreeable, and had not the least regret — a bliss which I most sincerely hope will prove a lasting one.

  She then gave a grave hint as to why that might not be possible:

  The Duke’s intimate friends say he has sense and does not want merit — to be sure the jewel 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.

  Despite all this, Mrs Delaney ended up by imploring, ‘I heartily wish they may be as happy as they are great!’

  It did not take long for Georgiana to see her marriage as others viewed it: with pessimism. Within a year of the ceremony, she had miscarried and nearly died. The duke had proved less attentive than she would have expected, and tensions were increased by her growing gambling problems. Despite an allowance of £4,000 per year, she was already in debt to the sum of £3,000. Georgiana’s parents agreed to pay this off, on condition that she confess the extent of her folly to her husband. When she obeyed them, the duke reimbursed his parents-in-law for the full amount, without comment. However, others were openly talking about the profligacy of the young duchess, and Devonshire’s growing sense of humiliation was reinforced when Sheridan’s play School For Scandal debuted in 1777; it was evident that Georgiana’s reputation was the inspiration for the dizzy character of Lady Teazle.

  From an early stage, the elderly relations on each side could see that all was not well with the marriage. Countess Cowper, the First Earl Spencer’s mother and Georgiana Devonshire’s grandmother, alluded to the problem in a letter to a Mrs Port, dated February 1778: ‘The Duchess of Devonshire is much quieter than she was, and is always at home before the Duke …’

  Gradual acceptance that the marriage was not a success led Georgiana to take an increasingly independent stance, socially, politically and romantically. These three strands constantly overlapped, but Georgiana’s undoubted pre-eminence in social status, allied with her increasingly intense desire to partake in the sphere of politics, combined with her vulnerability to passionate attachments to members of both sexes, formed a heady cocktail which certainly assured her of the attentions of the masses. Long intrigued by the goings-on of the aristocracy, they were now served by a newspaper industry of unprecedented sophistication and influence. By the end of the 1770s, the decade in which Georgiana was launched into the public consciousness, there were nine
daily newspapers competing with one another in London alone.

  With her distinctive style, Georgiana was a godsend to circulation figures, attracting huge attention for every new nuance of fashion that she initiated. It was largely thanks to her that the hoop, with its rigidity and formality, became a thing of the past; and yet her championing of the equally ludicrous hair tower, which was a yard high, was slavishly imitated by any lady who had the leisure time and the money to employ hairdressers to build up such a showy statement of vanity and indolence. Similarly, the French hair powder she favoured gained enormous popularity, and her liking for muslin gowns made them the height of fashion. It would be no exaggeration to state that Georgiana was the epicentre of all that was modish and desirable.

  There is no doubt that, although bemused by the attention she received, the young Georgiana also revelled in the shallow excitement of it all; a point not missed by her increasingly prim mother, who scolded Georgiana on her twenty-fifth birthday: ‘In your dangerous path of life you have almost unavoidably amassed a great deal of useless trash — gathered weeds instead of flowers. You live so constantly in public you cannot live for your own soul.’

  However, she was prepared to sacrifice some of her privacy for those causes closest to her heart — and none was closer than that of the Whig politicians. The Spencers and the Devonshires were two of the leading Whig families, but this can only explain Georgiana’s inclination to support them — not the fervour she expended in the cause.

  In all she did, Georgiana betrayed the characteristics of an addictive personality: her relationships were indicative of this, as were her uncontrollable vices. Indeed, this mindset extended to the way in which she threw herself so wholeheartedly into politics. Even when she was severely damaged by public and private criticism for getting involved in what was viewed predominantly as a man’s game, she could not resist the thrill of the unpredictability of it all, the agony and ecstasy of defeat and victory.

  It was Charles James Fox who ignited Georgiana’s passion for politics. He stayed with Georgiana at Chatsworth in 1777, although they would have met prior to that at Althorp, where he was a frequent guest of the Spencers. During his Chatsworth visit, he gave the twenty-year-old duchess confidence that she could be more than merely the fashion icon wife of one of the most wealthy and influential men in the country. She could, through her direct interest and involvement, exercise power of her own, by helping to persuade people to support the Whig party.

  Georgiana was eternally grateful that a figure she respected so greatly could see value in her own contribution to the party they both espoused. Later, she would repay Fox’s confidence in her with a poem, which she had placed with his bust at Chatsworth:

  Here amidst the friends he loved, the man behold

  In truth unshaken, and in virtue bold;

  Whose patriot zeal, and uncorrupted mind,

  Dared to assert the freedom of mankind:

  And whilst extending desolation far

  Ambition spread the baneful flames of war;

  Fearless of blame, and eloquent to save,

  Twas he —’twas Fox the warning counsel gave,

  Midst jarring conflicts stemmed the tide of blood

  And to the menaced world a sea mark stood.

  Ah! Had his voice in Mercy’s cause prevailed,

  What grateful millions had the statesman hailed

  Whose wisdom bade the broils of nations cease,

  And taught the world Humanity and Peace.

  But, though, he failed, succeeding ages here

  The vain, yet pious, effort shall revere;

  Boast in their annals his illustrious name,

  Behold his greatness, and confirm his fame.

  Horace Walpole once said of one of Georgiana’s poems that it was ‘easy and prettily expressed, though it does not express much’. However, the above composition shows the intensity of her belief in Fox and the causes he represented. She believed — as did her brother, George John, then Viscount Althorp — that the American colonies should be granted their freedom from the unwelcome tyranny of the British Crown, and she adopted the blue and buff colours of the colonial soldiers to show her solidarity with their cause. In this way her position of ‘empress of fashion’ cross-pollinated her desire to be seen as a serious political figure in her own right.

  Lord North’s Tory ministry fell in 1782. Now Georgiana devoted all her energies and a considerable amount of money to helping the Whigs, who triumphed in the subsequent general election. So important was the support of the celebrated aristocrat seen to be by the Whigs at the time, that they even had fans made with images of Georgiana on them, which they sold by the hundred to help fund and publicize their aims.

  Two years later, in 1784, Georgiana, with her devoted younger sister, Harriet, again pitched in to help the Whigs. This time the cause was directly that of Fox, who was seeking one of the two important parliamentary seats of Westminster. There were only 18,000 voters, since the right to enfranchisement in Britain, until 1832, was very strictly regulated, being based on qualifications of income and property. However, it seemed to those who watched the two Spencer girls canvassing that they intended personally to address each of those eligible to vote, in a bid to do their best for Fox. Indeed, the lengths to which these two noble ladies were prepared to go to grub up votes, struck many as unseemly. Cornwallis noted that Georgiana was prepared to visit ‘some of the most blackguard houses in the Long Acre’, while Horace Walpole remarked that she was ‘coarsely received by some worse than tars’, and that she ‘made no scruple of visiting some of the humblest of electors, dazzling and enchanting them by the fascination of her manner, the power of her beauty and the influence of her high rank’.

  Georgiana and Harriet were not the only ladies of title prepared to get their hands dirty in this most grubby and bitter of campaigns — Lady Salisbury was doing much the same for the Tories — but Georgiana’s notoriety made her an easy target for critics of her party and herself. They said she exchanged her kisses for votes, something she always denied, but definitely a charge that has stuck for over two centuries — it was the first story about my great-great-great aunt that I can remember being told as a boy. And then there were insinuations at the time, particularly in the Tory press, that she was not stopping at kissing. The accusation that she was having an affair with Fox may have been more valid, but the picture of a depraved aristocrat hawking her body around the most unsavoury parts of Westminster, prepared to prostitute herself in return for votes, was a concerted attempt to belittle and undermine through vicious and persistent libels one of the Whigs’ most potent electoral weapons.

  The result was a vindication of Georgiana’s stoicism in the face of vile abuse: Fox was elected in a victory that became a hallowed part of the Whig tradition. Furthermore, Georgiana had achieved her goal by becoming a recognized political figure in the country at large. However, this success was at a cost not just to her peace of mind — the press abuse continued well after the votes were counted — but also to the Devonshire finances. It was estimated that Georgiana spent over £30,000 in support of Fox in the 1784 Westminster campaign, much of it, according to her opponents, through inducements that bordered on outright bribery.

  *

  Georgiana Spencer was becoming increasingly concerned at the way in which her daughter’s life was unravelling, and, as was her wont, the Dowager Countess Spencer looked to her own inadequacies as the reason for her favourite child’s shortcomings. Young Georgiana rejected such assertions:

  You talk of the bad example you have set me, you can mean but one thing — gaming, and there, I do assure you it is innate, for I remember playing from seven in the morning till eight at night at Lansquenet with old Mrs Newton when I was nine years old and sent to King’s Road for the measles.

  Young Georgiana was right: gambling coursed through her veins. We have already seen how the four preceding generations on her father’s side were all addicted to the thrill of chance. Ad
ded to this her mother’s family, the Poyntzes, for all their sincere Christian inclinations, was afflicted with the same predisposition. Lord Lansdowne’s dry observation illustrated the contradiction perfectly: ‘I have known the Poyntzes in the nursery, the Bible on the table, the cards in the drawer.’

  It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Georgiana Spencer’s advice on the whole subject of gambling should have something of the expert air about it. ‘Play at whist, commerce, backgammon, trictrac or chess,’ she said to her daughter, ‘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.’

  However, Georgiana Spencer was unable to control her own taste for gaming, let alone that of her daughter. George Selwyn reported in a letter of 1781 to the Earl of Carlisle:

  The trade or amusement which engrosses everybody who lives in what is called the pleasurable world is Pharon, and 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 his chief parties.

  There were also widely believed rumours that, in her passion for gambling, Georgiana Spencer had even been seen to tear the rings from her hands to place on the gaming table as wagers.

  The difference between the two ladies was that Lady Spencer could afford her losses, since her husband readily funded her gambling, while the duchess had to keep her losses secret for as long as it was possible from her altogether less sympathetic partner. However, when the younger Georgiana’s losses were of a size that they could no longer be ignored, she had no alternative but to approach the duke for funds.