The Duchess

As the marriage approached Georgiana’s faults became an obsession with her mother, who feared that her daughter did not understand the responsibilities which would come with her new role: ‘I had flatter’d myself I should have had more time to have improv’d 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.’49 Whenever they were apart, Lady Spencer criticized Georgiana’s behaviour in long letters filled with ‘hints to form your own conduct … when you are so near entering into a world abounding with dissipation, vice and folly’.50 In one, she included a list of rules governing a married woman’s behaviour on Sundays. Georgiana would have to rise early, pray, instruct the children or servants, then read an improving book, and above all ‘make it a rule to be among the first [to church], and to shew by my good humour and attention to everybody that I saw nothing in religion or a Sunday to make people silent, ill-bred or uncomfortable …’ Flirting and gossip were to be absolutely avoided on this day.51

Most observers shared Lady Spencer’s disquiet, although not for the same reason.

We drank tea in the Spring Gardens [recorded Mary Hamilton in her diary]: Lady Spencer and daughter, Lady Georgiana, and the Duke of Devonshire joined us: he walked between Lady Georgiana and I, we were very Chatty, but not one word spoke the Duke to his betrothed nor did one smile grace his dull visage. – Notwithstanding his rank and fortune I wd not marry him – they say he is sensible and has good qualities – it is a pity he is not more ostensibly agreeable, dear charming Lady Georgiana will not be well matched.52

Mrs Delany had come to a similar conclusion. She happened to be at a ball in May where Georgiana danced for so long that she fainted from the heat and the constriction of her dress – ‘Which of course made a little bustle,’ she informed her friend. ‘His (philosophical) Grace was at the other end of the room and ask’d “what’s that?” They told him and he replied with his usual demureness (alias dullness), “I thought the noise – was – among – the – women.”’ He did not even make a pretence of going over to where Georgiana lay to see how she was.53

Meanwhile the Spencers assembled a trousseau more lavish than those of many princesses on the Continent. In three months they spent a total of £1,486 on hundreds of items: sixty-five pairs of shoes filled one trunk, forty-eight pairs of stockings and twenty-six ‘and a half’ pairs of gloves filled another.54 They bought hats, feathers and trimmings; morning dresses, walking dresses, riding habits and ball gowns. There was her wedding dress to be made, her court dress, her first visiting dress, as well as cloaks, shawls and wraps. The prospect of a union between two such wealthy and powerful families naturally caught the attention of the press – there had been no Duchess of Devonshire for over two decades. People described the marriage as the wedding of the year and anticipated that the new Duchess of Devonshire would revive the former splendour of Devonshire House. The Whig grandees also looked upon the match with favour, hoping that the married state would have a beneficial effect on the Duke.

The wedding took place on 7 June 1774, two days earlier than the official date. There had been so much publicity about the marriage that the Spencers feared the church would be mobbed with curious onlookers. They persuaded the Duke to accompany them to Wimbledon Park and have the service conducted in the parish church there. According to Mrs Delany, Georgiana knew nothing of their plans until the morning of the ceremony. She did not mind at all; a secret marriage appealed to her. ‘She is so peculiarly happy as to think his Grace very agreeable’ and, to Mrs Delany’s surprise, ‘had not the least regret’ about anything. She wore a white and gold dress, with silver slippers on her feet and pearl drops in her hair. There were only five people present: the Duke’s brother, Lord Richard Cavendish, and his sister Dorothy, who was now the Duchess of Portland, and on Georgiana’s side only her parents and grandmother, Lady Cowper.55 Georgiana’s feelings clearly showed on her face, while the Duke appeared inscrutable. His new wife may have occupied his thoughts, although they may well have turned to another Spencer. Not very far away in a rented villa, on a discreet road where a carriage could come and go unseen, Charlotte Spencer, formerly a milliner and no relation to the Spencers, was nursing a newborn baby: his – their – daughter Charlotte.56

* Misspellings have been corrected only where they intrude on the text.

†Georgiana became Lady Georgiana Spencer at the age of eight when her father John Spencer was created the first Earl Spencer in 1765. For the purpose of continuity the Spencers will be referred to as Lord and Lady throughout.

* The usual method for estimating equivalent twentieth-century values is to multiply by sixty.

* The Spencers originally came from Warwickshire, where they farmed sheep. They were successful businessmen and with each generation the family grew a little richer. By 1508 John Spencer had saved enough capital to purchase the 300-acre estate of Althorp. He also acquired a coat of arms and a knighthood from Henry VIII. His descendants were no less diligent, and a hundred years later, when Robert Spencer was having his portrait painted for the saloon, he was at the head of one of the richest farming families in England. King James I, who could never resist an attractive young man, gave him a peerage and a diplomatic post to the court of Duke Frederick of Wurttemberg. From then on the Spencers left farming to their agents and concentrated on court politics.

*His father, the Hon. John Spencer, was in fact a younger son and, given the law of primogeniture, had always expected to marry his fortune or live in debt. However, his mother was the daughter of the first Duke of Marlborough, and the Marlboroughs had no heir. To prevent the line from dying out the Marlboroughs obtained special dispensation for the title to pass through the female line. John’s older brother Charles became the next Duke. John, meanwhile, became head of the Spencer family and subsequently inherited Althorp. Charles had inherited the title but, significantly, he had no right to the Marlborough fortune until his grandmother Duchess Sarah, the widowed Duchess of Marlborough, died. Except for Blenheim Palace, she could leave the entire estate to whomever she chose. Sarah had strong political beliefs and she was outraged when Charles disobeyed her instruction to oppose the government of the day. In retribution she left Marlborough’s £1 million estate to John, with the sole proviso that neither he nor his son should ever accept a government post.

* My heart is yours. Keep it well.

* Political life had not suited the reserved and honest Duke. But for the rivalry between Henry Fox and William Pitt, neither of whom would support a government with the other as its leader, George 11 would not have chosen this ‘amiable, straightforward man’, who was noted ‘for common sense rather than statesmanship’. The Duke shared with Lord Spencer, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship, a total lack of aptitude for the bravado of parliamentary politics. Dr Johnson said of him, ‘If he promised you an acorn, and none had grown that year in his woods, he would have sent to Denmark for it.’ But if asked to formulate a strategy for dealing with the French he sat there helplessly, waiting for someone to suggest an idea. He only participated in government out of a sense of duty and the effort it cost him ruined his health and destroyed his peace of mind.

* In 1719 the Duke of Richmond, finding himself unable to meet his obligations, paid off his debts by agreeing to have his eighteen-year-old heir married to the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Earl of Cadogan. The ceremony took place almost immediately, after which the girl was returned to the nursery and did not see her husband again until she was sixteen.

2 Fashion’s Favourite 1774–1776

The heads of Society at present are the Duchess of Devonshire, Duchess of Marlborough, Duchess of Bedford, Lady Harrington, and Co. etc.

Morning Post, Saturday 29 July 1775

The excess to which pleasure and dissipation are now carried amongst the ton exceeds all bounds, particularly among women of quality. The duchess of D—e has almost ruined her constitution by the hurrying life which she has led for some time; her mother, Lady S—r has mentioned it with concern to the Duke, who only answers, ‘Let her alone – she is but a girl.’

Morning Post, Monday 11 March 1776

THREE DAYS after the wedding the Duke was spotted with his drinking companions trawling the pleasure gardens of Ranelagh at Chelsea. He provoked more gossip when he turned up four hours late for his presentation at court with Georgiana. All newly married couples were required to present themselves to the Queen at one of her twice-weekly public audiences at St James’s Palace, known as ‘Drawing Rooms’. ‘The Drawing-room was fuller than ever I saw it,’ a witness recorded, ‘excepting that of a Birthday [of the King or Queen], owing, as I suppose, to the curiosity to see the Duchess of Devonshire.’ Georgiana was wearing her wedding dress and ‘look’d very pretty … happiness was never more marked in a countenance than hers. She was properly fine for the time of year, and her diamonds are very magnificent.’1 The formidable Lady Mary Coke wondered why the Duke ambled in on his own several hours after Georgiana. He ‘had very near been too late; it was nearly four o’clock when he came into the Drawing-Room’. She watched him for some time and noticed that he showed no emotion. ‘His Grace is as happy as his Duchess,’ she decided charitably, ‘but his countenance does not mark it so strongly.’2 Lady Mary’s opinion might have been different had she known about Lady Spencer’s frantic messages to the Duke, imploring him not to be late.

Protocol demanded that Georgiana should pay a call on every notable person in society. For the next three weeks she went from house to house, making polite conversation for fifteen minutes while her hosts scrutinized the new Duchess of Devonshire. In an era when social prestige was itself a form of currency, Georgiana’s visits were highly prized. Lady Mary Coke was not among the 500 whom Georgiana managed to see, which soured her feelings towards her cousin for ever after.

In early July Georgiana set off with the Duke on the three-day journey from London to Derbyshire, to stay at Chatsworth for the summer. The long hours on the road, with no amusement save the view from the window, were the first she had spent alone with her husband. He had hardly addressed a word to her since the day of their marriage. His taciturnity made her nervous and she overcompensated by being excessively lively. There were plenty of scenes for her to point out: a picturesque church here, a field of poppies there – rural villages in England were much more prosperous and better kept than in Europe. A Frenchman on a tour of Britain in 1765 was amazed to see that labourers had shoes on their feet, and instead of grey rags wore ‘good cloth’ on their backs. In contrast to the mud cottages of the peasantry in France, all the dwellings he saw were ‘built of brick and covered with tiles, [and] have glass windows’.3

The road had dwindled to little more than a bumpy track by the time the cavalcade of wagons and baggage carts reached Derbyshire. Here rocky moorland and fast-flowing waterfalls replaced the green hedgerows and rich hay fields of the south. Daniel Defoe toured England at the beginning of the century and described the countryside around Chatsworth as a ‘waste and howling wilderness with neither hedge nor tree’. But Horace Walpole, visiting the area half a century later, when tastes inclined towards the romantic, was spellbound by its ruggedness. ‘Vast woods hand down the hills,’ he wrote, ‘and the immense rocks only serve to dignify the prospect.’ He admired the terrain; but Chatsworth itself – the ‘Palace of the Peak’ – with its gloomy grandeur and isolated situation, lowered his spirits.

Successive generations of Cavendishes had transformed the original Elizabethan design until it was unrecognizable. In 1686 the first Duke of Devonshire, who was of ‘nice honour in everything, but the paying of his tradesmen’, ordered the architect William Talman to tear down Chatsworth’s pointed turrets and design something more modern in their place. He continued adding to the house until the result was a novel evocation of the English baroque style. Georgiana’s first glimpse was of a rectangular stone box, some 172 feet long and three storeys high, topped by a cornice and balustrade which bore elaborately decorated urns at regular intervals. The façade was a bold design of double-height windows alternating with fluted pilasters, with the Cavendish symbol of interlocking serpents carved along the length of the cornice. As a whole the house and parkland was far more imposing than Althorp, except for one note of light relief in the garden – a tree made of lead. Unsuspecting visitors who stood beneath it were drenched by water spurting from its leaves. Not everyone appreciated the joke: the traveller and diarist Joseph Torrington thought it ‘worthy only of a tea garden in London’.

Torrington also criticized the grounds as lacking in taste, even though they were the work of Capability Brown, and the house as ‘vile and uncomfortable’.4 He disliked the heavy use of gilt on every available surface; the combination of unpainted wainscoting and inlaid wood floors made the rooms appear dark even in the middle of the day. By the 1770s Chatsworth had an old-fashioned feel; its layout, which followed the seventeenth-century practice of linking public and private rooms along a single axis, was inconvenient and impractical; newer houses had their family apartments entirely separate from their entertaining rooms.5 But Chatsworth was meant to be more than a family home. Its sumptuous rooms, with their classical wall paintings and triumphant gods staring down from the ceilings, performed a public function. Their purpose was to inspire awe among the lower orders who trooped round on Public Days, and respect – as well as envy – among the aristocracy. Comfort was a secondary consideration. The dining room could easily accommodate over a hundred but – as Georgiana discovered – there were only three water closets in the entire house.

She was not alone with the Duke for long. The Spencers came to stay for an extended visit, bringing with them her sister Harriet and an assortment of pets, favourite horses and servants. They came in part to provide Georgiana with the support and guidance she desperately needed. The Duke’s brothers and uncles were already there to check on her behaviour as the new Duchess and chatelaine of Chatsworth. Georgiana was on show from the moment she stepped out of her carriage. Aristocratic life in the eighteenth century had little in the way of privacy: almost every activity took place before an audience of servants. Rank determined behaviour, and the social pressure on Georgiana to remain ‘within character’ was intense. She was now the wife of one of the most powerful men in the country. Everyone – from the staff assembled outside Chatsworth to welcome her on her arrival, to the neighbours who came to pay their respects, to the people who met her at public functions, saw her from afar, or read about her in the papers – expected her to know precisely what to say and how to perform.

What help the Cavendishes were prepared to give Georgiana lay waiting in her bed chamber. The Duke’s agent, Heaton, had prepared a list of the household expenses, which included the names of the parishioners and tenants who received charity from the estate and whose welfare was now in her trust. Some received food, others alms; when the Duke was in residence the poorer tenants were given bread on Mondays and Thursdays. His arrival, and likewise his departure, was always marked by a gift of ox meat to the local parishioners. Georgiana’s first task was to fulfil her social obligations and, with the importance of the Cavendish name in mind, to establish goodwill between herself and the Duke’s many dependants.

These duties gave a rhythm to Georgiana’s first days and weeks at Chatsworth. In the morning the men went out riding or shooting, while she made exploratory visits to the neighbourhood accompanied by Lady Spencer, who was pregnant again. She quickly made friends with all the Duke’s tenants, displaying the charm and sympathy for which she would become renowned. On one of their walks they found a disused building which Georgiana decided should be used for her first charity school. This was the sort of thing she enjoyed; as a little girl she had given her pocket money to street children and, according to her grandmother, ‘seemed as glad to give [the coins] as they were to have them’.6

They would return at mid-day, rest, and prepare for dinner at three. It was the most important meal of the day and could last up to four hours. Instead of one course following another, there were two ‘covers’, or servings, of fifteen or so sweet and savoury dishes, artfully arranged in geometric patterns and decorated with flowers. Georgiana self-consciously practised being the hostess in front of her parents and the Duke, giving orders to footmen and displaying a command which she did not necessarily feel. Eighteenth-century dinners were less formal than those in the century to follow, but their rules, though subtle, were strictly observed.* Although diners could sit where they chose, the host and hostess always sat at the head and foot of the table with the principal guests on either side. It was considered ill-bred to ask for a dish or to reach too far across for one – the servants standing along the walls were supposed to ensure that the guests’ plates were never empty. Not only did Georgiana have to keep up a lively flow of conversation, she also had to watch the servants for neglect, the guests for boredom, and the Cavendishes for signs of displeasure.

In the evening she played cards with some of the guests or listened to music performed by Felix Giardini, the violinist and director of the London Opera and a friend of the Spencers. At her request he composed pieces for small orchestra which Georgiana and some of her musical guests would perform under his direction. The house was filling up as more of the Duke’s friends and relatives came to inspect his bride. Georgiana did her best to appear composed and friendly towards the sophisticated strangers who often arrived at short notice and expected to be entertained. That she succeeded in fulfilling her role was thanks to the presence of Lady Spencer by her side as much as to her careful upbringing. Georgiana had little acquaintance with her husband or with his world; training was all that she could rely upon to take her through the first few months.

By late September autumn colours were returning to the park and the sun was casting longer shadows. It was easy to stay outside for too long after dinner and catch a chill, as Lady Spencer did one afternoon. She seemed to have only a slight fever; but a few days later she suffered a miscarriage. When she recovered her only desire was to return to Althorp; she had lost two children, and Georgiana’s steps towards independence may have caused her to feel she was losing another. Georgiana came downstairs one morning to discover that her parents had left without saying goodbye. In a hastily scribbled note Lady Spencer apologized for running away, and blamed it on ‘my Spirits having been lower’d by my late illness … Do not think I shall ever be so nonsensical about quitting you again,’ she promised, ‘but the number of people that are here are so formidable and I felt so afraid of disgracing myself and distressing you, that I think it better to get out of the way.’7 Georgiana was distraught and full of guilt: ‘Oh my dearest Mama,’ she wrote immediately, ‘how can I tell [you], how can I express how much I love you and how much I felt at your going.’8

Lady Spencer was relieved to receive Georgiana’s letter; its tone reassured her that independence was still some way off. She replied with a description of the trust and obedience she expected of Georgiana in their future relationship:

Here commences our correspondence, my dear Georgiana, from which I propose myself more real pleasure than I can express, but the greatest part of it will quite vanish if I do not find you treat me with that entire Confidence that my heart expects. Seventeen years of painful anxiety and unwearied attention on my part, and the most affectionate and grateful return on yours is surely a sufficient [reason] to give me the very first place. I will not say your heart because that the D of D will have, but in your friendship.9

Georgiana was happy to comply as her days were lonely now. ‘As soon as I am up and have breakfasted I ride,’ she wrote. ‘I then come in and write and or do anything of employment, I then walk, dress for Dinner and after Dinner I take a short walk if it is fine and I have time ‘till the Gentlemen come out, and then spend the remainder of the evening in Playing at Whist, or writing if I have an opportunity and reading.’10 Not caring for his wife’s after-dinner concerts, the Duke usually took his friends off to drink and play billiards. Georgiana would not see him until much later, when, already in bed and fast asleep, she would be woken up by a noise at the door – he was impatient for her to become pregnant. She often rose full of dread at what lay ahead in the day. Sometimes she stayed in bed as long as possible, but this evasive measure brought its own problems.

Lord Charles and Lady D. Thompson and Miss Hatham arrived and I was obliged (for they were let in before I knew anything about it) to pretend that I was gone walking and at last went down Drest the greatest figure you can Imagine [she wrote sadly to her mother]. To compleat my Distress another Coachful arrived – of People I had never seen before. As I could not have much to say for myself, and some of the Company were talking about things I knew nothing of, I made the silliest figure you can conceive, and J [Lord John Cavendish] says I broke all the rules of Hospitality in forgetting to offer them some breakfast.11

She also had to preside over the Public Days which had resumed after Lady Spencer’s departure. Chatsworth still maintained the tradition of holding a Public Day every week. On these occasions the house was open to all the Duke’s tenants, as well as to any respectable stranger who wished to see the house and have dinner with its owners. Georgiana and the Duke stood in the hall wearing their finest clothes, as if attending a state occasion, and personally greeted each visitor. They had to remain gracious and sober while their guests helped themselves to the free food and drink. ‘Some of the men got extremely drunk,’ Georgiana recorded after one dinner, and her friends, ‘if they had not made a sudden retreat, would have been the victims of a drunken clergyman, who very nearly fell on them.’12 Her first appearance naturally caused great excitement in Derbyshire, but after a few weeks the Public Days became less crowded. She learned how to orchestrate a room full of strangers, how to pick out those whom she ought particularly to distinguish, and how to detach herself from those who would otherwise cling to her arm all day.*

Public Days were a feudal relic from the era of vassals and private armies. Because of the expense only the grandest of families continued the tradition. Such lavish entertainment was now a means of cultivating good relations with the tenantry and of safeguarding local political influence. In the eighteenth century the maintenance of an electoral borough was a family matter; it was part of the estate, as tangible and valuable as land. The Cavendish influence in parliament depended on the number of MPs who sat in the family’s ‘interest’. At its height, thirteen MPs owed allegiance to the Duke, the second largest grouping within the Whig party after the Marquess of Rockingham, who had eighteen.13 Since the Duke’s brother-in-law the Duke of Portland controlled ten, when the Cavendishes collaborated they presented a formidable faction.