The Duchess

The reputation of the Duke of Dorset did not suffer. He had seduced another man’s wife, but while many people looked askance at his behaviour there was no question of excluding him from society. He even remained friends with Lord Derby and continued to be invited to his house. The Derby affair illustrates the point made by Georgiana in The Sylph: eighteenth-century society tolerated anything so long as there was no scandal. Publicly immoral behaviour earned public censure; private transgressions remained whispered gossip. In Lady Spencer’s words, Lady Derby ‘insulted the World with her Vice’.24

In July 1779, when the season was over, Georgiana went with her parents to Spa. The Duke did not accompany them, pleading military duty, and spent the summer marching his soldiers at the camp. The English and French aristocrats on holiday at Spa behaved as if the two countries were not at war. Good breeding and fine manners counted for more than martial spirits. Madame de Polignac had been waiting for Georgiana to arrive and they passed the holiday together, walking arm in arm through the wooded fields surrounding the village. They were such conspicuous companions that their friendship reached the notice of the English press. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser reported: ‘The reigning female favourite of the Queen of France is Madame Polignac, a great encomiast of the English, and a particular admirer of her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire …’25

On her return in September Georgiana experienced her first battle. They were travelling in a convoy of two packet boats, escorted by a naval sloop, The Fly, for protection. At dawn on 14 September French privateers attacked her boat. The Fly moved in to engage the French ships, enabling the packet boats to escape. Although he possessed only fourteen guns, Captain Garner fought for over two hours until both sides were too exhausted to continue. The half-sinking ship then managed to rejoin its frightened escorts and sail for England. Captain Garner immediately became a hero and the adventure was seized upon by the press as welcome propaganda.26 Spain had also declared war against Britain. The country was now fighting against a triple alliance.

When Georgiana rejoined the Duke at the camp in October 1779 she was appalled by the soldiers’ low morale as well as the lethargy of their leaders. The combined French and Spanish fleets had been sighted in the Channel; the government expected an invasion force to arrive at any day.

Lord Cholmondeley and Cl Dalrymple arriv’d here from Plymouth at 7 – they give a terrible account of the defenceless state of the place and the danger of the troops encamp’d on the Mount Edgcumb side [she wrote]. In case of the enemy’s landing they must all either perish by the invaders or be drown’d in making their escape. They say the troops are all out of spirits and looking on themselves as a forlorn hope, and the Duke of Rutland says he should think himself lucky to escape with the loss of an arm or a leg.27

She was determined to stay and watch the fight, telling her mother: ‘I rather think there will be an invasion and that I shall see something of it to complete the extraordinary sights I have been present at this year.’28 But the camp waited in readiness for an invasion which never came. The strain of anticipation was reflected in the drinking and debauchery that went on after dark; during one all-night party the stables burned down and six horses were killed.

Georgiana was soon fed up with camp life. She was more sensitive now to the sycophancy she perceived in some of her friends. Mrs Crewe, she complained, was caressing her without ceasing. Lady Frances Masham, she noticed, ‘always talks to me as if she thought I had not my five senses like other people’.29 She returned to Devonshire House without the Duke. Her departure annoyed the Cavendishes, who thought she had no right to go anywhere on her own when she had not yet given them an heir. ‘I found the Dss in town,’ wrote Lord Frederick Cavendish to Lady Spencer on 11 November 1779. ‘I never saw her Grace look better, [but] she laments that she has grown fat. To say the truth she does look bigger, I would fain have dropt the last syllable.’30

Fearing that she would never have a child, Georgiana noted every variation in her menstrual cycle with obsessive diligence. ‘The Prince is not yet come,’ she wrote to her mother in October, ‘but my pains are frequent and I continue the Spa water.’31 After five and a half years of marriage she was so desperate to conceive that she went to the notorious quack Dr James Graham. Lady Spencer was dismayed. ‘Let me entreat you not to listen to Dr Graham with regard to internal medicines,’ she urged, ‘but consult Warren.’32 Graham’s use of electricity, milk baths and friction techniques to encourage fertility in women and cure impotency in men left her unimpressed. Society, however, had taken him up and Graham was earning sufficient money to practise out of the Adelphi, where his Temple of Health and Hymen attracted long queues of desperate women. ‘Lady Carlisle went to see Dr Graham’s Electrical Machinery in the Adelphi,’ wrote Miss Lloyd to Lady Stafford, ‘[it is] a most curious sight, and he is a most wonderful man. She and I agree that he might be of use to you.’*33 Georgiana saw him for a couple of months, and then abruptly stopped. Her wish for a child had been answered, only the child was not hers: the Duke had asked her to accept his daughter Charlotte by his late mistress.34

Charlotte Spencer had remained his mistress until at least 1778, but what had happened to her then remains a mystery; it is known only that she died shortly afterwards. Georgiana’s thoughts on the situation have not survived – she almost certainly knew of the relationship: articles about it had appeared in the Bon Ton Magazine and the Town and Country Magazine. The latter had declared, ‘it was the greatest paradox’ that the Duke must be the only man in England not in love with the Duchess of Devonshire. After Charlotte’s death the Duke sent for their daughter and her nurse, Mrs Gardner. It was not uncommon among aristocratic families for a husband’s illegitimate children to be brought up by his wife. Georgiana’s cousin Lady Pembroke was generous towards Lord Pembroke’s bastard children until he proposed giving them the Herbert name. Georgiana was in raptures at the prospect of adopting the girl. She met her for the first time on 8 May 1780 and told her mother:

she is a very healthy good humour’d looking child, I think, not very tall; she is amazingly like the Duke, I am sure you would have known her anywhere. She is the best humour’d little thing you ever saw, vastly active and vastly lively, she seems very affectionate and seems to like Mrs Gardner very much. She has not good teeth and has often the toothache, but I suppose that does not signify as she has not changed them yet, and she is the most nervous little thing in the world, the agitation of coming made her hands shake so, that they are scarcely recover’d today.35

The Duke, Georgiana wrote, was also ‘vastly pleased’ with the little girl. Lady Spencer was baffled by her daughter’s excitement. ‘I hope you have not talk’d of her to people,’ she warned, ‘as that is taking it out of the Duke’s and your power to act as you shall hereafter choose about her.’ Georgiana was sending the wrong message to the Duke, she thought; she would do better to appear neutral about the child.36 Georgiana ignored her advice; little Charlotte was all she had of her own to love, and she didn’t care where the girl came from. However, her gambling sharply increased just before Charlotte’s arrival and continued afterwards at the same level. ‘You say you play’d on Sunday night till two,’ wrote Lady Spencer in distress. ‘What did you do? I hope you are not meant by the beautiful Duchess who has taken to the gaming table and lost £2000. Pray, my dearest G. take care about play … and deserve to be what I doubt you are, whether you deserve it or not, the idol of my heart.’37

Charlotte had no surname but Georgiana resisted any move which might alert the child to her irregular background. ‘We have not been able to fix on a name,’ she wrote to Lady Spencer, ‘but I think it will be William without the S if it will not look too peculiar.’38 The usual practice was to use the father’s Christian name or, if he had several titles, one of his lesser ones, in the place of a surname. After much discussion they agreed on Williams instead and decided to present Charlotte as a distant, orphaned relation of the Spencers.

Meanwhile both George and Harriet became engaged. The twenty-two-year-old George confessed that he was ‘out of his senses’ over a certain Lady Lavinia Bingham.39 Although Lavinia had no money of her own, and did not come from a particularly distinguished family – her father, Lord Lucan, was a mere Irish peer – the Spencers made no objection to the match. At first glance she seemed to be a good choice. She was pretty in a conventional way with blue eyes and fair hair, talkative, intelligent and possessed of a strong sense of propriety, which Lady Spencer applauded. Less obvious until later were her more unattractive traits: she was highly strung, vindictive, hypocritical and a calm liar who maintained a veneer of politeness to her in-laws while freely abusing them in conversation elsewhere. She was also neurotically jealous of anything which diverted George’s attention from herself and loathed Georgiana and Harriet. Georgiana tried not to show her misgivings even though she could sense Lavinia’s dislike. ‘My Dearest Dearest Dearest Brother,’ she wrote on 9 May 1780 after the announcement of their engagement. ‘Happiness, ’tho’ not to be had directly, is in store for you – That every hour, every minute of your life may be full of happiness is the sincere and fervent wish of my heart for it loves you dearly in the double character of friend and brother.’40

Harriet’s engagement took place two months later, in July. She was now an attractive nineteen-year-old, tall like Georgiana, slim, and the image of Lord Spencer with his dark eyebrows and pale skin. She was quieter than her sister, more analytical and less prone to flights of fancy, and she still worshipped Georgiana with a devotion which bordered on fixation. Most people compared her unfavourably to Georgiana – a judgement Harriet had made little effort to correct since childhood. Yet on her own she revealed herself to be every bit as individual in her character: passionate, vulnerable, witty and intuitive. Georgiana had never shared her parents’ dismissal of her sister and now, ironically, it was Georgiana’s appreciation of her that was helping to show Harriet in a more glamorous light. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser put it neatly in saying that Harriet ‘never appeared to greater advantage than on Thursday at the Opera; without detracting from her ladyship’s good graces, part of this effect may be imputed to comparison – her sister, the Duchess not “being by”.’41

Her choice was the Duke of Devonshire’s cousin Frederick, Lord Duncannon, the eldest son of the Earl of Bessborough. She explained to her friends that ‘he was very sensible and good tempered and by marrying him she made no new connections, for now her sister’s and hers would be the same.’42 Georgiana was slightly surprised by her sister’s choice. Even though the Cavendishes had been pushing for the match she had not thought him the type of man to attract Harriet. He was quiet, not particularly good looking, and not even financially secure – his father was known to have mortgaged all his estates. Harriet admitted to her cousin that his proposal had come as a surprise; she had ‘not the least guess of [his regard] till the day papa told me, for from your letters I thought his coming to St James’s Place was merely on Miss Thynn’s account.’43 She added sadly:

I wish I could have known him a little better first, but my dear Papa and Mama say that it will make them the happiest of creatures, and what would I not do to see them happy, to be sure the connections are the pleasantest that can be … when one is to choose a companion for life (what a dreadful sound that has) the inside and not the out is what one ought to look at, and I think from what I have heard of him, and the great attachment he professes to have for me, I have a better chance of being reasonably happy with him than with most people I know. But there are some things which frighten me sadly, he is so grave and I am so very giddy … I will not plague you any more with my jeremiads for I am very low, pray write to me.44

Lord and Lady Spencer approved of the marriage because of the Cavendish connection, and probably influenced Harriet more than they realized, but they were also concerned about the couple’s financial situation. Harriet’s marriage portion of £20,000 went to pay off part of Lord Bessborough’s £30,000 debt. She would be left with a mere £400 a year pin money and £2,000 a year joint income with her husband.45 Lady Spencer begged Georgiana not to lead her impressionable sister into bad habits, and above all, to keep her away from the Devonshire set. ‘I am sure I need not assure you of my doing everything in the world (should this take place) to prevent her falling into either extravagance or dissipation,’ she promised.46

Georgiana was confident that if she could reform her own life, protecting Harriet would be simple. Since her return from Coxheath she had sought to impress Fox and the other Whig leaders with her political understanding. She followed the debates in parliament, never missing an opportunity to discuss their implications at party dinners. Only a short time before people had described her as a novice: ‘I have also some hopes that she will turn Politician too,’ remarked a family friend in 1775, ‘for she gave me an account of some of the speeches in the House of Lords, Ld Grove made an odd one, and the Bishop of Peterborough a prodigious good one, only she said it was rather too much like Preaching.’ As an afterthought the friend added, ‘She must have heard all this from the Duke.’47 No doubt it was true then, but Georgiana soon became sufficiently well informed to have her own opinions about political debates. She had also perfected the skills required of a political hostess: her dinners at Devonshire House served a useful purpose: waverers could be kept in line and supporters rewarded. She had also learned how to extract information without betraying any secrets in return. She knew when to appear knowledgeable and when to appear ignorant.

Georgiana absorbed the minutiae of party politics. To an outsider the House of Commons was an inchoate system of temporary factions and alliances. In reality, the 558 MPs could be divided into three broad categories. The largest, with 185 or so members, was the ‘King’s Men’ or the court interest. These were MPs who received patronage from the crown and could therefore be relied upon to support any Prime Minister who had the confidence of the King.48 The second group was made up of career politicians – some of whom, like Edmund Burke and James Hare, depended upon patrons – who regarded politics as an end in itself. The third and smallest category was the ‘Independents’, men who owed allegiance to no one and regarded themselves as above party politics. In fact they generally supported the government and only on very rare occasions voted with the opposition. In the House of Lords the court interest, known in the upper house as the ‘King’s Friends’, accounted for more than half the 150 peers, which made it impossible for the opposition Whigs to win any debate on numbers alone.

Among the career politicians there were, indeed, factions and alliances, named after the men who lead them – Shelburnite, Northite and Rockinghamite. The labels Whig and Tory, as applied to two distinct parties, only came into official use in the early nineteenth century. The idea of an organized opposition was not acceptable in the eighteenth century – any party which opposed the King was, in theory, committing treason. On the other hand, although opposition was regarded as the exception to good government rather than the rule, since 1688 the Commons had prided itself on its independence from the crown. Peers and MPs regarded it as their duty to be both servants to the crown and defenders of the constitution. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England Mr Justice Blackstone described the constitution as a framework of checks and balances: ‘In the legislature, the people are a check upon the nobility and the nobility a check upon the people; by the mutual privilege of rejecting what the other has resolved: while the King is a check upon both, which preserves the executive power from encroachment. And this very executive power is again checked, and kept within bounds by the two houses …’49

The Whigs had to be careful not to appear dangerous or disloyal. Edmund Burke spent much of his time defending the party against such charges by arguing that they were challenging the King in order to safeguard the victories of the Glorious Revolution. Even though the old Tory party was defunct, the Whigs used the name as a term of abuse against North’s ministry because of its reputation as the party of the King. Since the Whigs accused George III of increasing the influence of the crown at the expense of civil liberty, it suited them to call their opponents ‘Tories’. In fact the King was doing no such thing, and Lord North and the other men in government did not have the least shred of Tory sympathies, but the opposition Whigs liked to portray themselves as the true Whigs, martyred for their beliefs by the forces of tyranny.

Georgiana fervently believed this to be the case even if some members of the opposition were rather more cynical. When she wore the adopted Whig colours of blue and buff (taken from the colours of the American army) she did so out of conviction and expected her friends to do the same. It was precisely because she was a fervent believer that she was able to carry off her military uniforms and women’s auxiliary corps at Coxheath without being ridiculed. She had become one of the party’s best-known representatives. Fox was the first to recognize her talent for propaganda – they shared a flair for the public aspect of politics. They understood, for example, the potency of symbols in raising or lowering morale, in attracting or repelling support.

Fox encouraged Georgiana to play a greater role in increasing the party’s public presence. As a result, in January 1780 she failed to appear at court for the annual celebration of the Queen’s birthday. Society and the press remarked upon her absence. It was the first time she had shunned the court and people read it as a sign of the Whigs’ confidence that they would soon drive Lord North from office. When parliament reconvened on 8 February the government was beset by a number of crises. Not only was the war going badly; there was unrest in Ireland and a widespread fear that it might follow the example of America and declare independence. There was also popular discontent at home, fuelled by the Whigs, and hundreds of petitions poured in from around the country demanding democratic reform of the parliamentary system.

The session began promisingly enough. Prodded by the Whigs, the Duke of Devonshire at last gave his maiden speech in the Lords on 17 March. Edmund Burke congratulated Georgiana, saying with more hope than conviction, ‘it will become, by habit, more disagreeable to him to continue silent on an interesting occasion than hitherto it has been to him, to speak upon it.’50 Burke was leading the assault on North and the big push came in the shape of his Economical Reform Bill, which aimed to limit the crown’s powers by reducing the number of pensions and sincecures on the Civil List. The government defeated all but one of his proposals but at the expense of alienating backbenchers and independents by its heavy-handed methods of ensuring compliance.

On 6 April 1780 the Whigs ambushed North with a surprise resolution. John Dunning, a lawyer MP who had honed his rhetorical technique at the Inns of Court, rose to give a speech. His allegiance was well known and he began, as expected, by condemning the government’s quashing of the Economical Reform Bill. But then, with clear and precise logic he pointed out that over 100,000 people had petitioned parliament for change, and that the government’s response was merely to crush it. He paused theatrically, holding the House in rapt attention, before, his voice rising to a crescendo, he urged the following resolution: ‘The influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’ The House was electrified; MPs jumped from their seats and waved their order papers at him. The vote was 233 to 215 in favour. Westminster was in pandemonium and the government thrown into confusion.

North’s immediate response was to tender his resignation, but George III insisted that he remain in office. The Speaker fell ill, preventing the Commons from meeting for a week, and Georgiana feared that the delay would cost them votes. ‘Lord Westmoreland [sic] as much as told me he should vote with North on Tuesday,’ she recorded.51 When the Commons met again her presentiment proved correct. Dunning was overconfident and called for parliament to remain sitting until the changes demanded in the petitions had been implemented. This was too radical for the independent MPs, who voted against the resolution. The Whigs reacted bitterly: Dunning had thrown away their advantage. Fox approached him after the debate and advised him ‘to make no more motions’.52 ‘We were sadly beat last night in the House of Commons,’ Georgiana informed Lady Spencer; ‘the ministry people are all in great spirits.’53

A few weeks later she reported, ‘We go on vilely indeed in the House of Commons.’54 Her friend Lord Camden concurred: ‘Our popular exertions are dying away, and the country returning to its old state of lukewarm indifference, the Minority in the House of Commons dwindle every day, and the Opposition is at variance with itself.’55 But there was one piece of good news. The eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales, the future George IV, had allied himself with the Whigs. His support, as the heir apparent to the throne, absolved them of the charge of disloyalty to the crown, which made it easier for them to attack the King.

In supporting the Whigs against his father the Prince was following an established tradition among the Hanoverians. From George I onwards, father and son had hated each other. Each successive Prince of Wales had thrown in his lot with the opposition, and the future George IV was no different from his predecessors. He feared and resented his parents while they despised him as weak, duplicitous and lazy. Georgiana recorded her first impressions of him in a scrapbook, which she entitled ‘Annecdotes Concerning HRH the Prince of Wales’. Knowing that the memoir would only be seen by future generations she was absolutely candid in her opinion of him:

The Prince of Wales is rather tall, and has a figure which, though striking is not perfect. He is inclined to be too fat and looks too much like a woman in men’s cloaths, but the gracefulness of his manner and his height certainly make him a pleasing figure. His face is very handsome, and he is fond of dress even to a tawdry degree, which young as he is will soon wear off. His person, his dress and the admiration he has met with … take up his thoughts chiefly. He is good-natured and rather extravagant … but he certainly does not want for understanding, and his jokes sometimes have the appearance of wit. He appears to have an inclination to meddle with politics – he loves being of consequence, and whether it is in intrigues of state or of gallantry he often thinks more is intended than really is.56

He was clever, well read, and possessed of exquisite taste in art and decoration, but he was wholly deficient in self-knowledge. Following the King’s orders the Prince had been isolated from companions of his own age and tutored by dry old men who saw to it that his life was one long regime of worthy activities. But instead of creating a paragon of virtue, the Prince’s strict and joyless upbringing had made him vain, petulant and attention-seeking. As soon as he could he rebelled against everything he had been taught. The King relaxed the cordon sanitaire around the Prince when he turned eighteen only to the extent of holding a few private balls for him, ‘from which I and many others were banished,’ wrote Georgiana, ‘as no opposition person was asked’ – which only increased his desire to mix with people who did not meet with his parents’ approval.