The Duchess

I conjure you my Dst. Mama to forgive my warmth about Lady Melbourne today [she wrote after a painful argument]. But I do assure you that everything I have known of her has been so right and her conduct to me so truly friendly and for my good, [that] I was miserable to see her so low in your opinion – I hope you will not object to my continuing a friendship which it would be so terrible for me to break off, and I am sure that next year from a thousand things you will not have to be uneasy about my goings on.13

Georgiana’s ‘goings on’ had become an obsession with the press. Her clothes, her movements, her friends – in short anything new or unusual about her – was considered newsworthy. Rarely did a week go by without a snippet of gossip appearing somewhere. On 30 December 1776 the Morning Post reported that Georgiana and Lady Jersey had all their friends playing ‘newly invented aenigmas’ which, the Post learned, they called ‘charades’.14 Throughout 1777 a series of anonymous publications appeared addressed to Georgiana, some of them attacking her slavish devotion to fashion, others defending her.15 More often, though, the scandal sheets embroiled her in fictitious escapades with numerous lovers. There were enough stories of licentious behaviour attached to members of the Circle to give any allegation the veneer of plausibility.

Audiences flocked to Drury Lane in May 1777 to see Sheridan’s new play The School for Scandal, partly because it was known to be a satire on the Devonshire House Circle. ‘I can assure you that the Farce is charming,’ enthused Mrs Crewe to Lady Clermont; ‘the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Worseley, and I cut very good figures in it.’16 Sheridan pandered to the audience’s expectations by portraying Georgiana’s friends as a set of louche aristocrats whose moral sensibilities had been blunted by a life of wealth without responsibility. Georgiana is Lady Teazle: young, easily influenced, possessed of a good heart but needing a firm husband to manage her properly. As the play opens Sir Peter Teazle is quarrelling with Lady Teazle over her spendthrift ways and her preoccupation with fashion. ‘I’m sure I’m not more extravagant than a woman of fashion ought to be,’ she retorts. The evil Lady Sneerwell (a mixture of Lady Jersey and Lady Melbourne) connives with the journalist Snake (Sheridan) and Joseph Surface to bring about Lady Teazle’s ruin. But the play ends with Lady Teazle resisting Surface’s attempt to seduce her and renouncing her scandal-loving friends as worthless and silly. Members of the Circle thought it was a tremendous joke to see themselves caricatured on stage, and helped to publicize the play by ostentatiously arriving en masse to watch the first night.

Georgiana’s thoughts on being portrayed as Lady Teazle have not survived, but the play almost certainly made her uneasy. Behind the broad humour was a semi-serious message which did not escape her notice. ‘I am alarm’d at my own dispositions because I think I know them now,’ she told Lady Spencer in August. ‘I am afraid that the minute I think seriously of my conduct I shall be so shocked, especially with regard to all that has happened this year …’17 Lacking the maturity and confidence to stand up to her friends, Georgiana was being drawn into a life of heavy drinking and compulsive gambling. She often found herself acting against her own judgement but she felt unable to resist the pressures on her to conform.

In November 1777 Lady Sarah Lennox observed that Georgiana seemed to have no ballast. ‘The Pretty Duchess of Devonshire who by all accounts has no faults but delicate health in my mind, dines at seven, summer as well as winter, goes to bed at three, and lies in bed till four: she has hysteric fits in the morning and dances in the evening; she bathes, rides, dances for ten days and lies in bed the next ten.’ Georgiana made periodic attempts to reform. As often as she could she presented Lady Spencer with a positive picture of her life, emphasizing the time she spent with the Duke, her involvement in charity work, the frequent prayers she said and the sermons she heard. ‘You see my dearest Mama, how happy I am to tell you of anything I think you will approve of,’ she had written in September 1776; ‘it gives me such real pleasure to feel that I am doing anything that makes me more pleasing to the best of mothers.’18 Inspired by such sentiments, Georgiana would adopt a starvation diet, lock herself away in her room and see no one for a week, but as soon as she emerged she compensated with all-night drinking and eating binges until she was too exhausted to get out of bed. Her weight fluctuated wildly as a consequence. ‘You are very apt to be too much so, and run into extremes which your constitution will not bear,’ Lady Spencer complained.19 The effect on Georgiana’s general health was catastrophic: she had one miscarriage after another, leading the Duke and the Cavendishes to accuse her of deliberately sabotaging their hopes for an heir. Only Lady Sarah Lennox questioned whether the Duke might not be to blame for neglecting Georgiana when she was young and so vulnerable to suggestion. ‘Indeed,’ she concluded, ‘I can’t forgive her or rather her husband, the fault of ruining her health.’20

Just as Lady Sarah Lennox made her astute observation, towards the end of 1777, Georgiana met two quite different people, Charles James Fox and Mary Graham, whose impact on her would have far-reaching consequences. She was introduced to Mary in October while taking the sea air in Brighton. Mary was there with her husband, Thomas, and was recuperating from a bout of pneumonia. Georgiana was there in the hope of improving her fertility. Medical opinion cited a weak placenta as the cause of serial miscarriages like Georgiana’s; the only remedy was to take water cures, either bathing in sea water or drinking warm spa water. (There was no concept of male infertility in the eighteenth century, except in cases of impotence.)

Georgiana was immediately captivated by her. ‘Mr and Mrs Graham came the same day as the Duke and Dss,’ reported Lady Clermont to Lady Spencer; ‘she is a very pretty sort of woman, the Dss likes her of all things; they are inseparable, which is no bad thing. I wish she had half a dozen more such favourites.’21 Mary’s father, Lord Cathcart, was formerly the British envoy to Russia, and she had lived abroad for much of her life. Lady Cathcart had died when Mary was fourteen and she had since been obliged to act as a surrogate mother to her baby sister, Charlotte. Georgiana and Mary were the same age and had married in the same year, but Mary lived a very different, sheltered life. She was quiet, serious and gentle – Georgiana might not have noticed her were it not for her breathtaking beauty: she was known as ‘the beautiful Mrs Graham’. Gainsborough painted her portrait at least four times in an attempt to capture the serenity of her features.

The obvious mutual attachment between the two women was remarked upon at Brighton, although Georgiana made light of it to Lady Spencer. ‘I live very much with Mrs Graham,’ she wrote en passant. ‘I think her extremely amiable and we like him too very much – but Lady Sefton does not approve of it as I suppose she expected I should live entirely with her.’22 However, the letters Georgiana wrote to Mary after they had left Brighton show that their feelings for each other had grown into infatuation. The first surviving letter of Georgiana’s is a response to a reproach from Mary for not writing more often. Georgiana was staying at Althorp with Lady Spencer, who regarded the interlude as her chance to initiate some remedial training. She kept a tight rein on her daughter, insisting that she imitate her own daily regimen of early morning walks, hours of improving literature, and endless fussing about the servants. The unaccustomed harshness of the regime so exhausted Georgiana that she was too tired to keep up the promised letter-journal to Mary.

I cannot bear the thought of your thinking me negligent [she replied in anguish after receiving a furious letter from Mary] I have had scarce any opportunity lately – and besides I have been very busy – in the first place with writing the verses to my Father on his birthday and with the picture – (As soon as I have time to write them out I will send them to you) and then, I have been working very hard for Mama to compose her some reflections to read to the servants on their taking the Sacrament. Would you believe me capable of so serious a work? My dear friend, despite my giddiness I am capable of thought sometimes. You would not think from appearances that I am able to have deep friendships, but, nevertheless you must know how tenderly I love you. It is the same with other things. I am full of madness but I also have a little sense. I perceive I am eulogising myself, but that is characteristic of a bad heart and I have often told you mine is bad … I am falling asleep and must leave you now, but I want to say to you above all that I love you, my dear friend, and kiss you tenderly.23

By the spring of 1778 it was Lady Spencer’s turn to complain that Georgiana’s letters had slowed to a trickle.24 Not only did Georgiana spend all her free time writing to Mary; no other subject interested her: ‘I made Mr James set by me at supper last night to have the pleasure of talking about you – it is so deliciously sweet for me, my adorable friend, to speak constantly of you – as I am continuously thinking of you it is a subject that I am very well prepared for … I went to see Lady Anne and Lady Margaret, they both talk a great deal about you and my heart applauds their good taste – I have seen your picture too at Gainsborough’s.’25

Both of them were frightened that the intensity of their friendship would become the subject of gossip. It was almost impossible to keep such things hidden. Maids and footmen were not above reading their employers’ mail, and there was always the danger of letters going astray or falling into the wrong hands. In one fragment Georgiana wrote: ‘I have been reading over this curious letter and I am almost sorry I put so much about what vex’d me when I began writing, I must tell you I am quite easy about it now and if I was sure you would get this letter safe, I would tell you all about it – but I don’t dare.’26 Despite the risk of exposure, she urged Mary to accept a small drawing of herself: ‘You desire me to give you my opinion about the picture, I can not see why you should not have it, I understand what you mean, but I don’t think it would appear odd – consider that in a little time we shall be old friends – however I think I can send you a drawing when I go to town which will not have any of the inconveniences you thought of as you need not shew it – for I shall like you to have something like me.’27

Whether or not Mary actually received the picture is not known. Almost nothing else survives from their lengthy correspondence except a couple of later fragments. Discouraged by the Duke’s freezing civility, Georgiana longed for the tenderness, companionship and affection she experienced with Mary – and also something else, equally if not more important: relief from having to perform for her relatives or the ton. Lady Spencer, her friends, the Duke and his family all placed expectations on her, often forcing her to play roles which made her feel uncomfortable or inadequate. Only with Mary could Georgiana unburden herself and talk about her confusion and dismay.

The hurry I live here distracts me [she wrote in 1778], when I first came into the world the novelty of the scene made me like everything but my heart now feels only an emptiness in the beau monde which cannot be filled – I don’t have the liberty to think or occupy myself with the things I like as much as I would wish and all my desires are turned upside down – you are the only person to whom I would say this, anybody else would only laugh at me and call it an affectation – I seem to enjoy every thing so much at the minute that nobody can think how much I am tired sometimes with the dissipation I live in.28

Georgiana’s sense of unease about her life of dissipation was turning to disgust but, as she remarked sadly, her friends would only laugh if she tried to explain herself. Her intimacy with Mary helped her to gain a perspective on her situation, particularly on the limitations of her marriage. It was unthinkable, however, for a woman to take a lover before she had supplied her husband with a son. Convention allowed aristocratic women a cicisbeo – a term borrowed from the Italian to mean a platonic lover who provided escort duties and other practical services in place of the husband. In The School for Scandal Lady Teazle says she will admit the wicked Joseph Surface ‘as a lover no farther than fashion sanctions’. ‘True,’ he replies, ‘a mere Platonic cicisbeo – what every wife is entitled to.’29 But, despite a large crowd of suitors eager to comply, Georgiana was the exception in lacking even this.30 In 1779 her cousin Lady Pembroke remarked to Lord Herbert: ‘You wrote some time ago terrible things you had heard about the poor Dss of Devonshire, which made me laugh, they were so totally without foundation, and I forgot to answer it. She has never been even talked for any body in the flirting way yet …’31

Whether and to what extent physical intimacy played a part in Georgiana’s relationship with Mary is impossible to determine. Several of her friendships contained an element of flirtatiousness: it was a French habit she had acquired from Madame de Polignac and Marie Antoinette. Since the publication of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s enormously successful Julie ou La nouvelle Héloïse French women had self-consciously imitated the loving friendship between Julie and Claire. However, there were rumours that Marie Antoinette and the Little Po were more than simply friends, which their displays of physical affection encouraged.32*

Rousseau made a deep impression on Georgiana, and her own copy of La nouvelle Héloïse at Chatsworth is scored with her markings.33 She lived on a plane of heightened feeling which her English friends found alluring but also disturbing. ‘Some part of your letter frightened me,’ Lady Jersey once wrote, not altogether sure how to interpret Georgiana’s declarations of love.34 Georgiana’s passionate imprecations went far beyond the ordinary endearments written between women friends, ‘Je t’aime mon coeur bien tendrement, indeed, indeed, indeed, I love you dearly’ is one of her typical messages to Lady Melbourne.35 However, even taking hyperbole into account, Georgiana’s letters to Mary were more personal, more intense, clearly separating them from her other correspondence. Georgiana was seeking her Claire, who would know her every thought, be at her side during the day, share her bed at night, and hold her in her arms when she died. But it was not to be. In 1781 the doctors ordered Mr Graham to take Mary to a warmer climate: it was the only hope for her weak lungs. They had diagnosed her as consumptive. Georgiana was bereft and searched without success for a replacement.

Charles James Fox, her second new acquaintance, made a great impression on Georgiana, not in a romantic way – that would emerge later – but intellectually. It was Fox, more than anyone else, who led Georgiana to her life’s vocation – politics. Fox was a brilliant though flawed politician. Short and corpulent, with shaggy eyebrows and a permanent five o’clock shadow, he was already at twenty-eight marked down as a future leader of the Whig party when the Marquess of Rockingham retired. Georgiana became friends with him when he came to stay at Chatsworth in 1777. His career until then had veered between political success and failure, between unimaginable wealth and bankruptcy. He confounded his critics with his irrepressible confidence, and exasperated his friends by his incontinent lifestyle. Eighteenth-century England was full of wits, connoisseurs, orators, historians, drinkers, gamblers, rakes and pranksters, but only Fox embodied all these things.

He was born in 1749, the second of the three surviving sons of the Whig politician Henry Fox, first Baron Holland, and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. Although an unscrupulous and – even for the age – corrupt politician, Lord Holland was a tender husband and an indulgent father who shamelessly spoilt his children. No eighteenth-century upbringing has received more attention or encountered such criticism as Fox’s. By contemporary social standards the Holland household was a kind of freak show. There were stories of Fox casually burning his father’s carefully prepared speeches, smashing his gold watch to see how it would look broken, disrupting his dinners – and never being punished.

Having enjoyed such an unrestricted existence, both materially and emotionally, Fox was similarly open and generous with his friends. He was incapable of small-mindedness or petty ambition. It was this, coupled with his natural talent for leadership, which won him instant popularity at Eton and enduring friendships throughout his life. Before he joined the Whig party Fox seemed to have no ambition except pleasure and no political loyalties except to his father’s reputation. This he vigorously defended in parliament against charges that, as Paymaster-General during the Seven Years War, Lord Holland had embezzled the country out of millions. No one could deny that the family had become unaccountably rich during this period. However, after his father’s death in 1774 Fox did his best to return the fortune to the nation by gambling it away at Newmarket and Brooks’s.

Lord Holland’s last act before he died had been to pay off his son’s £140,000 debt,36 but this generous gift had no effect on Fox’s behaviour. He stayed up night after night, fighting his body’s urge to sleep with coffee and platefuls of food. According to one anecdote, he played hazard continuously from Tuesday to Wednesday night, winning, losing, recovering and finally losing all his money. He stopped on Thursday to rush to the House of Commons to participate in a debate on the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and went straight back to White’s afterwards. There he drank until Friday morning, when he walked to Almack’s and gambled until 4 p.m. Having won £6,000 he rode to Newmarket, where he lost £10,000.37 Though he very quickly frittered everything away, Fox could always count on friends like the Duke to support him financially and politically.* Occasionally he won money but he avoided games of skill, which he was very good at, for the excitement of games of chance. He spent so many hours at Brooks’s that he was rarely out of his gambling clothes.†

Fox displayed a sense of fun and theatre that equalled Georgiana’s. The term ‘macaroni’ was coined to describe the fashionable young fops of the 1770s who wore exaggerated clothes about town. The term probably originated in the 1760s, when members of the short-lived Macaroni Club brought attention to themselves by their predilection for all things foreign, especially food. Macaronis were much criticized in the press. The Oxford Magazine complained: ‘There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’38 Until his gambling debts made him poor, Fox was one of its most visible exemplars. Like Georgiana, he had an eye for colour and a talent for whimsy. The macaroni uniform strove for a super-slim elegance with narrow breeches and short, tight-fitting waistcoats. The flourish was in the finishes: large buttons and extravagant nosegays were essential; high-heeled shoes and a small hat perched on the side of the head added a certain flair. Fox’s particular contribution was to experiment with hair colour, powdering his hair blue one day, red the next. He wore multi-coloured shoes and velvet frills, a daring combination which challenged the fainthearted to follow him.

He went to stay at Chatsworth in August 1777, joining a large house party that included the Jerseys, the Clermonts, the Duke of Dorset, all the Cavendishes as well as their cousins the Ponsonbys, and the violinist Giardini. The week before his arrival Georgiana had written of her alarm and distress ‘at my own dispositions’. But she hid her feelings from her guests and no one noticed that her liveliness was as much a performance as the after-dinner entertainments.

Fox’s presence wrought an immediate change in Georgiana; he intrigued and stimulated her. For the first time since her initial attempts to educate herself two years before, she had found someone to emulate.

The great merit of C. Fox is his amazing quickness in seazing any subject’ [she wrote to her mother in August]. He seems to have the particular talent of knowing more about what he is saying and with less pains than anyone else. His conversation is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff puff – and what makes him more entertaining now is his being here with Mr Townsend and the D. of Devonshire, for their living so much together makes them show off to one another. Their chief topic is Politics and Shakespear. As for the latter they all three seem to have the most astonishing memorys for it, and I suppose I shall be able in time to go thro’ a play as they do …39

In her next letter Georgiana informed her mother that she was reading Vertot’s Revolutions of Sweden. ‘I think it is the most interesting book in the world, I really was quite agitated with my anxiety for Gustavas Vasa,’ she wrote. ‘Especially at seeing a generous and open hearted Hero fighting for the liberty of his country and to revenge the memory of an injur’d friend against lawless cruelty and oppressive tyranny.’40 This was the Whig political creed in a single line: the hero fighting for liberty against lawless cruelty and oppressive tyranny. In practical terms for the Rockingham Whig party of the 1770s it meant opposition to George III, a mistrust of the powers of the crown and a vigilance over civil liberties. Fox had probably suggested Vertot to Georgiana. He had only lately converted to Whiggism, having served as a junior minister in the treasury until his outrageous behaviour and erratic support drove George III and Lord North to remove him. ‘Indeed,’ the King wrote in disgust, ‘that young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honour and honesty that he must become as contemptible as he is odious.’41 After his dismissal Fox became the protégé of Edmund Burke and under his tutelage recast his political ideas. The politician who once declared ‘[I] will not be a rebel to my King, my country or my own heart, for the loudest huzza of the inconsiderate multitude’ now claimed that the King ‘held nothing but what he held in trust for the people, for their use and benefit’.42

Fox’s ardour moved Georgiana. He talked to her as no one else did, treating her as his equal, discussing his ideas and encouraging her participation. She had once visited the House of Commons out of curiosity with Lady Jersey (women were banned from the gallery in 1778), but had not repeated the experiment. Fox awakened in her a sense of loyalty and commitment to the Whig party. By the time he left Chatsworth she was his devoted follower. Twenty years later she was still his most loyal supporter. ‘Charles always had faults,’ was all she would concede, ‘that may injure him and have as a Statesman – but never as the greatest of men.’43 Like his contemporaries at Eton and later at Brooks’s she had fallen under Fox’s spell. His following in parliament depended as much on his personality as on his views. To be a Foxite meant that one belonged to a gang whose single bond was an uncritical admiration of Fox.

Fox and Mary’s belief in Georgiana persuaded her that she could make something more of herself. In April 1778 she wrote of her desire to begin afresh. ‘I have the strongest sense of having many things to repent of and my heart is fully determined to mend,’ she told Lady Spencer; she planned to take Holy Communion (a rite less commonly performed in the eighteenth century) after her trip to Derby. But the same letter also hints at entanglements – gambling debts – which she regretted and feared. ‘By going there I break off many unpleasant embarrassments I am in with regard to others and the quiet life I shall lead there will give me time to think …’44