The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  In early 1805 there was a rumour, reported in the Morning Herald, that Georgiana Devonshire had lost, chiefly at faro, and principally at the hands of fellow female gamblers, a quite phenomenal £176,000, of which a very close female friend of hers was supposed, individually, to have won £30,000.

  Apparently Georgiana rushed into the duke’s library, crying, and informed him that she would be a woman of no reputation if her debts were not discharged. Even though she had cashed in some of her own bonds, these had not realized more than a fraction of the outstanding sum. She was therefore looking to her husband to make good the enormous shortfall.

  The duke was apparently stunned by two things: the size of the alleged loss, and also the identity of the supposed friends — five women and two men — who had clearly conspired to prey on his wife’s uncontrollable weakness. He summoned two of his closest friends, and asked them what to do about both situations. They were unanimous in their advice: nothing should be paid.

  It is likely that some money exchanged hands, but nothing like the vast fortune that had been mentioned. It is also clear that the public shame was dealt with as best it could be, with the Morning Herald being persuaded to recant its story a few days later. There were, the paper said, no gamblers of distinction involved in this story; neither was there a house, as they had erroneously stated, set up near St James’s Street for such people to behave in a totally excessive manner; and, for sure, the Duchess of Devonshire had never partaken of any game of chance ... By overstating the apparent correction, the newspaper was subtly able to reinforce the credibility of its original allegations.

  It was not just her privileged friends who stood to benefit from Georgiana Devonshire’s addiction. There was a famous gambler of the time, ‘Old Nick’, who took £100 off a man running an errand for her, although the money was meant to repay a debt elsewhere.

  Georgiana thought it best to appeal to ‘Old Nick’s’ gentlemanly instincts, and asked him — given the circumstances under which his opponent had been in possession of the £100 — to return all or most of the sum to her, its rightful owner.

  It became evident instantly that ‘Old Nick’s’ gentlemanly instincts were not as well developed as his money-making ones, and he retorted lustily: ‘Well, Madam, the best thing you can do is to sit down with me at cards, and play for all you have about you; after I win your smock, so far from refunding, I’ll send you home BARE — to your Duke, my dear.’ This proved to be one gambling invitation the duchess turned down.

  It was fortunate that Georgiana enjoyed the friendship of her banker, Thomas Coutts. However, being on good terms with him meant that she could be the recipient of his frankest advice. When informing her that her debts had risen to £6,000, he took it upon himself to administer a rebuke that was redolent with exasperation:

  It shocks me to think that your Grace puts into Hazard by indulging a passion for play. There is nothing your Grace can acquire; you have already titles, character, friends, fortune, power, beauty, EVERYTHING superior to the rest of the world ... all these to gratify this destructive passion. I should be happy beyond expression if I could think that I had even the smallest share in saving your Grace from the dreadful consequences I foresee.

  But Coutts was telling her nothing that she did not know already. The deep self-loathing of the unreconstructed addict bleeds through this letter, written by Georgiana in 1797 to Selina Trimmer:

  Surely you know the infirmity of my nature, that with a heart not bad (I humbly trust) I have an instability of nature that is sometimes madness. The only alleviation of this to my friends is that it is only to those I love I have ever shown these odious destructive paroxysms. A thousand little fancies, little suspicions and jealousies had long, perhaps, been brooding in my mind. A spark, I know not what, brought it out.

  This admitted lack of self-control spilled over as dramatically into her love life as it did into her finances. There were extramarital affairs, with some of the most notable men in the kingdom, although whether this extended to the heir to the throne remains debatable. Wraxall, who wrote Georgiana’s Posthumous Memoirs, stated that ‘the Duchess of Devonshire succeeded Lady Melbourne in the attachment of the Prince of Wales’, while adding, ‘of what nature was that attachment and what limits were affixed to it by the duchess, must remain [a] matter of conjecture’.

  Similar mystery surrounds the question as to whether or not she was bisexual. Certainly, she had especially close relationships with two very attractive women. The first was ‘the beautiful Mrs Graham’, Mary Graham, whom she met at the end of 1777. When Mary was sent abroad four years later to recover from consumption, Georgiana was left numb with sadness — to a greater extent than might be considered normal — at the physical absence of a mere friend.

  More intense still was her relationship with Lady Elizabeth Hervey, the daughter of the Bishop of Derry, who was later Earl of Bristol. In an age when marital separation and divorce were still deeply unconventional, Lady Elizabeth had left her husband, John Thomas Foster, and had chosen to live by herself, despite the greatly reduced financial circumstances this left her in. However, she was confident of her own legendary irresistibility. ‘No man could withstand her,’ said the historian Edward Gibbon. ‘If she chose to beckon the Lord Chancellor from his Woolsack in full sight of the world, he could not resist obedience.’

  She managed to inveigle her way into the company of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, becoming a useful buffer to both in their troubled marriage. Georgiana’s mother, Countess Spencer, did not like the unconventional arrangement at all, guessing that Elizabeth — also known as ‘Bess’ — was intimate at least with her son-in-law; and most likely with her daughter, too.

  Georgiana was deeply protective of the burgeoning ménage à trois, telling her mother:

  I have just been speaking to the Duke about your objection to Lady Eliz. He has often told me that (if we continue to live together, which my unfortunate conduct about money renders very doubtful) if I had a moment’s uneasiness about her he would be far from wishing her to live with us ... But good God, how far is this from being the case. I have, as well as him, the highest regard and respect and esteem for her as well as Love. In this case Dearest M. you must feel how impossible, how cruel, it would be to expose her to the malignant ill nature of the world and to expose ourselves to all the misery of parting with her, for what we know to be unjust and false ...

  How ‘unjust and false’ such suspicions were to remain, is open to question. It would appear from a letter that Bess wrote in 1784 that there was an element of romantic passion in the relationship:

  Who has any right to know how long or how tenderly we love one another! Why are excuses to be made for its sharpness and its fervency? ... Why is our union to be profaned by having a lie told about it? Can I ever forget the note that contained ‘the first instant I saw you, my heart flew to your service’? No, my dearest love, let spite and envy and jealousy do its full, I am proof against its sharper arrows, it has done its worst, for I do not reckon among possible things its now hurting you.

  If Bess and Georgiana were lovers, it seems clear that monogamy was not a condition of their relationship. In 1791 the duchess embarked on an affair with Charles Grey, the future Prime Minister, and quickly became pregnant by her young lover. The Duke of Devonshire knew that the pregnancy was not of his making, and despite having his own mistresses — one of whom, Charlotte Spencer (no relative of Georgiana’s), had borne him a daughter in 1774 — was beside himself with fury when faced with his own humiliation. He pursued Georgiana, her sister Harriet and Elizabeth to Bath, where they were trying their hardest to shield the truth from the cuckolded husband, and sent Georgiana into exile overseas. Harriet reported the decision to her own mother-in-law: ‘We must go abroad immediately — nothing else will do. Neither prayers nor entreaties will alter him. He says there is no choice between this, or public entire separation at home. Bess has very generously promised to go with us …’

 
Georgiana Spencer thought it best for her two daughters to go to France, on the pretence that such a trip was necessary for Harriet’s health. She tried to stop Bess going, too, but Bess and Georgiana were by now inseparable.

  The banishment lasted two years, and ended only when the French Revolution took a startling turn in 1793, with Louis XVI’s execution. Conditions were now simply too dangerous for the duchess to remain in France any longer. In the meantime, Georgiana had given birth to Grey’s daughter, known as Eliza Courtney, in Montpellier. Eliza later joined Grey’s family, and was introduced to people as his younger sister.

  Devonshire had offered Georgiana a stark choice, as the birth became imminent: either give her illegitimate child away and promise not to see its father again, or be divorced, and lose any right to see their mutual children again. She chose the former, since the prospect of further absence from her Cavendish children appalled her. During her time in France, away from her young, she had written to her nine-year-old daughter: ‘This year has been the most painful of my life.’

  For all her weaknesses, Georgiana was a very loving mother, turning her amateur writing skills to amusing them. She wrote a poem, ‘Passage of the Mountain of St Gothard’, dedicated to them — a work that was sufficiently highly regarded to be translated into French, Italian and German between 1802 and 1805. In 1816 it was reprinted by Bess, along with ‘Journey through Switzerland’, a work which led Coleridge to write:

  O Lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure,

  Whence learned you that heroic measure?

  On her return in September 1793 from her enforced stay abroad, Georgiana was somewhat chastened. She honoured her word, and did not arrange to see Grey again, even though she was still in love with him. She also managed to channel some of her energies into worthy pursuits, turning a room in Devonshire House into a laboratory — where she conducted her own scientific experiments — and attending lectures at the Royal Academy.

  Georgiana also devoted her attentions to those whom she had missed most during her time in France. Her sense of family was not confined to a deep care for her children, and she remained on good terms with her Spencer relatives — particularly her brother, George John, who had stayed loyal to her throughout her disgrace and exile. In April 1794, she wrote to him: ‘We passed last week at Woburn Abbey ... I had the pleasure of seeing Althorp again; and now to make me like it as much as it deserves, it only requires for me to see it with you and Lavinia.’ She continued, in loving and flattering vein, ‘Woburn is magnificent and comfortable but I assure Althorp lost nothing by comparison; and the D: of B: [Duke of Bedford], who went with us, was very much delighted with it — and quite jealous of the Library and Dairy …’

  If the Georgiana who returned from France was an altogether more thoughtful person than the one who had set out for it, there was sadly to be no such happy transformation for her physically. From 1796, her health started to deteriorate, and in a way that was cruelly obvious for one so vain, ravaging her looks: her right eye, initially merely painful, became inflamed and then swelled up to a huge size. Georgiana Spencer commented that her daughter had ‘little sight in her right eye and cannot yet lift up the eyelid except a very little way without assistance — it is ... horrible to look at’.

  The duchess who had once happily turned heads wherever she went, now longed for nobody to so much as look at her. As she herself acknowledged: ‘I grow more shy every day, and hate going anywhere except to my own boxes at the play and opera.’ The doctors had no idea how to treat her, subjecting their patient to appalling abuse, in the name of medicine. They strangled her, supposedly to increase the flow of blood to the affected area. Leeches were used, but to no avail. The eye became increasingly infected, and its sight started to fail.

  The final years of Georgiana Devonshire were marked with sadness; with her continued addiction to gambling, the resulting debts were a major source of concern for her and those around her. In 1799, Georgiana Spencer wrote to her son of Georgiana: ‘She is and always will be imprudent in the highest degree, but I trust in God she is not intentionally dishonest.’ However, the boundaries between intentional and unintentional dishonesty were by now as blurred as her sight, and Georgiana cheated her friend the Duke of Bedford out of a loan he had advanced her to meet some of her outstanding debts, leading to his refusing ever to have anything to do with her again.

  Meanwhile, illness compounded her financial misery. ‘I have been fretful and low,’ she confided. ‘Worries about money which return with quarter days, and the unwholesome life I lead, put me out of sorts.’

  In 1806, her health took a final turn for the worse when she caught a chill. Confined to bed, it was soon discovered that she was far more seriously ill than had previously been supposed, with a liver abscess which proved to be fatal. Again, the doctors not only failed to diagnose her condition correctly; in their keenness to be seen to be doing something, they caused Georgiana unnecessary pain. While she drifted in and out of a coma, they shaved her head and applied scalding blisters to her scalp. The right eye having failed her, the left one started to dim, too.

  And so the final days of one of the most glamorous figures of her era were spent in tortured confinement, surrounded by relatives and friends appalled by the suffering they were witnessing in one they deeply loved, despite all the disappointments and troubles her flawed character had visited upon them during her life.

  At 3.30 a.m. on 30 March 1806, Georgiana died. Bess’s journal reveals the desolation she felt at the loss of someone so dear, in such ghastly, agonizing circumstances: ‘Saturday was a day of horror beyond all words to express ... My heart feels broken ... my angel friend — angel I am sure she is now — but can I live without her who was the life of my existence!’

  Georgiana lay in state for five days, and attracted a steady line of mourners. Outside, in Piccadilly, thousands of Londoners came to Devonshire House to pay their own respects to a lady far removed from the realities of their existence, whose privileged life they somehow identified with — or, at least, were intrigued by.

  The Prince of Wales, on hearing the news of Georgiana’s death, gave her troubled life a fittingly generous postscript: ‘Then the best natured and best bred woman in England is gone.’

  Among the family members in the group who witnessed Georgiana Devonshire’s tortured end was Harriet, her loyal and devoted sister. She never recovered from the loss of the sibling who was also her dearest friend, whose follies and misjudgements she had sometimes matched and at other times tried to defuse or gloss over.

  Harriet, too, had made an unfortunate marriage — to Frederick, Lord Duncannon — although at the time of it, in 1780, the society figure Mrs Delaney had felt quite upbeat about this Spencer wedding, hoping that it would give Georgiana, Countess Spencer, ‘great satisfaction; as besides rank and fortune this is a most worthy amiable man, and I believe by all accounts she is a very valuable young woman, and I hope will have the good sense not to fall into those giddy errors, which have hurt her sister, who I hope is now sensible of those errors.’

  Indeed, there were some who worried for Duncannon in his choice, including Horace Walpole, who professed surprise to his correspondent at the choice of bride: ‘I know nothing to the prejudice of the young lady; but I should not have selected for so amiable and so gentle a man, a sister of the empress of fashion, nor a daughter of the Goddess of wisdom.’

  It appears that the common perception of Duncannon as a decent man did not tally with the cold bully that Harriet had to contend with at home. Those close to her noted that she appeared to be genuinely frightened of her husband, and did not like to be left alone with him. Moreover, he had not the money that people thought he had, leading the couple to live a life of further pretence, which resulted in them spending increasing time abroad, where the need to maintain a lavish lifestyle would not be so pressing, nor the failure to do so so obvious.

  This partly explains the willingness of the couple to follow Georgiana into exile with t
heir youngest child; that, and Harriet’s unswerving loyalty to her sister. Their brother, George John, kindly paid for a doctor to accompany the party, mainly to look after Harriet, whose health was poor.

  In 1793, Frederick’s father died, at the age of eighty-nine, and Frederick succeeded him as the Earl of Bessborough. There was now the prospect of more money in the marriage, but it never truly materialized: the inheritance, such as it was, was almost completely swallowed up by long-term creditors of the couple. At the same time marital happiness remained every bit as hard to come by as it had ever been, leading Harriet to prefer the company of her children and her sister to that of her husband. She was with Georgiana as frequently as possible until the very end, despite her own feeble health.

  Like Georgiana, Harriet was never short of admirers. Of these, the keenest was the Prince of Wales, who appears to have had a particular penchant for both the Spencer girls. Harriet was the lover of the playwright Sheridan and of Lord John Townshend. However, her most significant liaison was with Lord Granville Leveson Gower, whom she met on her travels in Naples. They subsequently had a child, given the name of Harriet Arundel Stewart. In what must have been a painful union for her, Leveson Gower later married Harriet Bessborough’s niece, another Harriet, who in turn adopted her and Leveson Gower’s love child.

  Of more lasting fame was Harriet’s eldest daughter, Caroline, better known as Lady Caroline Lamb, and as Lord Byron’s mistress. Endowed with a luscious beauty, Caroline was also afflicted with a troubled nature that both scandalized and intrigued contemporary society. The end of her passionate affair with the poet led her to write a thinly veiled account of Byron, Glenarvon, which resulted in Caroline’s being ostracized by her social peers, while they simultaneously raced to buy their copies of the exposé.

  Caroline married William Lamb, who was subsequently Prime Minister as Lord Melbourne. He tolerated his wife’s eccentric behaviour — which included stabbing herself at a society ball, and sending Lord Byron a sprig of her pubic hair — until, in the 1820s, Caroline appeared to overstep the line between tolerable and insane behaviour. They separated in 1825, and Caroline died — aged only forty-two — in 1828.