The Duchess

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The newspapers also reported on Georgiana’s activities to the wider world, but she was still their darling. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser increased its coverage of her to almost an item a week. On 11 June it proudly reported having seen ‘the Duchess of Devonshire, with a smart cocked hat, scarlet riding habit and a man’s domino, [who] looked divinely’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In July it informed readers that Georgiana was sitting for Gainsborough for a full-length portrait intended as a present to the Queen of France. It continued to follow her progress after the end of the season, when she and the Duke accompanied the Derbyshire militia to the military camp on the Roxborough Downs, near Plymouth.

On 6 September 1781 the French fleet once again appeared in the Channel, but for the press the event paled in comparison to Georgiana’s launch of HMS Anson: she christened the ship in front of a delirious crowd of several thousand who had streamed into the port for the day.

(#litres_trial_promo) When the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, contemporaries of the Devonshires, came for a visit the press invented a rift between the two women, calling them ‘the rival and beautiful Duchesses’. Georgiana had become so famous that her name was enough to make anything fashionable. The entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood understood the principles of selling better than any manufacturer in the country: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common stile [sic] ’till authoris’d by their betters – by the Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’

(#litres_trial_promo) To entice the middle classes to buy his china sets he named them after royalty and famous aristocratic families. ‘They want a name – a name has a wonderful effect I assure you,’ he told his partner. ‘Suppose you present the Duchess of Devonshire with a Set and beg leave to call them Devonshire flowerpots.’

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The Morning Herald’s love affair with Georgiana showed no signs of tiring. In December it stated that ‘her heart, notwithstanding her exalted situation, appears to be directed by the most liberal principles; and from the benevolence and gentleness which marks her conduct, the voice of compliment becomes the offering of gratitude.’

(#litres_trial_promo) These fawning notices revealed more than just a weakness for society hostesses. A recent upturn in the Whig party’s fortunes made the paper eager to be associated with the future regime. The war looked certain to end: General Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown to the combined forces of the French and the Americans, under the leadership of the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington. When Lord North heard the news he threw back his arms and cried, ‘Oh God. It is all over.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He offered his resignation to the King without delay, but after five years of war George III could not accept the defeat. He ordered the Prime Minister to remain in office and to prepare a counter attack.

The Whigs felt certain that they would soon be in power. Impatient for North to go, they harassed him in the Commons by relentlessly proposing motions of no confidence against the government. ‘We expect a good division tomorrow,’ Georgiana wrote on 26 February 1782.

(#litres_trial_promo) The following day they won a resounding victory in a motion calling for an end to hostilities against America. Driven by his implacable master, North limped on until 20 March, when at last the King accepted that the ministry had lost the confidence of the House and could not continue. George Selwyn told Lord Carlisle that the report of North’s resignation had spread to all the coffee houses within hours.

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George III refused to accept the Whigs en masse and insisted on a joint ministry between Lord Rockingham and the Earl of Shelburne, the leader of the old Chathamite faction whose sympathies lay more with the King than with the Whigs. The party accepted this bitter pill, hoping it might eventually be able to push Shelburne out. Having agreed the terms, the Whigs went to Devonshire House to celebrate. ‘I was at Devonshire House till about 4,’ wrote Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, ‘and then left most of the company there. All the new supposed Ministers were there except Lord Rockingham, who had probably other business, and perhaps with the King.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Georgiana threw a series of celebratory balls, each one lasting the whole night and part of the following day. The furniture downstairs was cleared out to make room for the crowds and the ceilings decorated with thick festoons of roses. Keeping the ten Van Dycks in the hall, Georgiana transformed all the other rooms into a fantasy with painted scenery and strategically hung mirrors. Public excitement about the balls grew, and on one night the managers of the Opera House shortened the last act to enable the Prince of Wales to leave on time. The next day the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, which had devoted several columns to the Devonshire ‘galas’, reported, ‘none was ever more admired than the minuets at the Devonshire Gala, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Devonshire in particular’.

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Having so long avoided St James’s, the Whigs now trooped into court to pay their respects. The King was too disgusted to hold a proper Drawing Room and sat glumly next to Queen Charlotte, while Georgiana and her friends made polite conversation with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland.

(#litres_trial_promo) Tradition demanded that the King recognize the new ministers with the awards of office, and he grudgingly offered the garter to senior Whigs. They accepted with a shameless delight which disgusted Nathaniel Wraxall. He watched with embarrassment as ‘The Duke of Devonshire … advanced up to the Sovereign, with his phlegmatic, cold, awkward air, like a clown. Lord Shelburne came forward, bowing on every side, smiling and fawning like a courtier.’ Only the Duke of Richmond, in his opinion, ‘presented himself, easy, unembarrassed and with dignity as a gentleman’.

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Fox approached Georgiana during the celebrations and made her a proposal. He was now Foreign Secretary, and under parliamentary rules MPs selected for office had to re-offer themselves to their constituents. Having been impressed by the crowd’s reaction to Georgiana’s appearance on the hustings at Covent Garden in 1780, Fox asked her to repeat her performance, only this time with more fanfare. She accepted without hesitation. The Duke and other grandees agreed to the proposal and allowed her to participate in discussions on how to plan the event. They decided that Georgiana should lead a women’s delegation. Since the crowds had responded so enthusiastically to one woman on the platform, they reasoned that five or six would be even more popular.

On 3 April Georgiana performed her first official duty for the party. The diarist Silas Neville was enjoying a stroll when he stumbled on the proceedings: ‘[I] was present in the Garden at the re-election of the Arch-Patriot Secretary. The Crowd was immense of carriages and people of all ranks. The Duchess of Devonshire and another lady were on the hustings and waved their hats with the rest in compliment to Charles, who was soon after chaired under a canopy of oak leaves and mirtle amidst the acclamations of thousands.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The London Chronicle reported the event in some amazement. In an age of free beer and bloody noses at election time the Whigs’ polished handling of public events was disconcerting. Fox stood on a platform beneath three large banners that read, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE, FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE, and INDEPENDENCE. Shouting above the roaring crowd, Fox thanked them for their confidence and promised he would unite the country in defence of liberty. ‘His friends wore orange and blue ribbons, with the word Fox on them,’ reported the paper.

(#litres_trial_promo) Georgiana was there with several other women, all wearing the Whig colours of blue and buff, and they raised their hats each time the crowd huzzahed. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed before. Milliners’ shops began making fans bearing Georgiana’s portrait which sold in their hundreds; Charles Fox and the Prince of Wales also became fashionable subjects: ‘The fans are quite new, and beautiful, designed and executed by the first masters of that art, and are striking likenesses of the exalted characters they represent; the prices are very moderate,’ claimed Hartshorn and Dyde’s of Wigmore Street.

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A week later, on 8 April, the Whigs made their first appearance in the Commons. At first MPs were disorientated: Lord North and his followers were no longer sitting on the treasury benches; in their place were the Whigs. Their uniform of blue and buff was gone and they wore the formal dress of government, all of them – even Fox – with hair powder, ruffles, lace around their necks, and swords by their sides. Lord Nugent had been burgled the night before and his lace ruffles stolen, causing a wag to remark that magistrates would probably find them on the new government.

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Lady Spencer, trapped at home with the ailing Lord Spencer, felt excluded from her children’s lives. The drum beat which accompanied Georgiana’s activities barely sounded in Wimbledon. On 22 May she recalled a recent conversation with the Duchess of Annenberg who had congratulated her on the family’s reputation for being one of the ‘happiest and closest’ in Britain.

(#litres_trial_promo) But Georgiana paid no attention to her mother’s hints; for the first time since her wedding in 1774 she looked forward to the future. According to James Hare, she appeared ‘very handsome and seems easier and happier than she used to do’.

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Georgiana’s optimism was born out of a new-found sense of purpose. In September 1782 she recorded her thoughts about the year.

The secret springs of events are seldom known [she wrote]. But when they are, they become particularly instructive and entertaining … the greatest actions have often proceeded from the intrigues of a handsome woman or a fashionable man, and of course whilst the memoires of those events are instructive by opening the secret workings of the human mind, they likewise attract by the interest and events of a novel … If some people would write down the events they had been witness to … the meaning of an age would be transmitted to the next with clearness and dependence – to the idle reader it would present an interesting picture of the manners of his country … I wish I had done this – I came into the world at 17 and I am now five and twenty – in these eight years I have been in the midst of action … I have seen partys rise and fall – friends be united and disunited – the ties of love give way to caprice, to interest, and to vanity …’

She hoped one day to be ‘a faithful historian of the secret history of the times’.

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* (#ulink_c8ebf8d6-0fc8-599a-a543-b6a4e726282d) To make a baby.

* (#ulink_3f8ddb24-665f-5ae4-8fc0-0e5f785a9250) The patriarchal right to ‘discipline and punnish’ a wife was not in question. If there was any doubt, a judge’s verdict on a case in 1782 resolved the issue. He declared that, if there was a good cause, a husband could legally beat his wife so long as the stick was no thicker than his thumb. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce (Oxford 1990), p. 201.

* (#ulink_3eb9d647-cd8a-57f9-94ac-cd44442032cd)In 1797 Lady Buckinghamshire and Lady Elizabeth Luttrell were actually arrested and fined £50 each for running a gambling concern with a faro-banker in Lady Buckinghamshire’s house.

PART TWO Politics (#ulink_6d349e38-fe92-5da9-93f8-daa21a7bedf3)

6The Cuckoo Bird1782–1783 (#ulink_fbe52c4f-f770-549c-a99a-1eb457703a65)

The Duchess of Devonshire, it is said, means to introduce a head piece which is to be neither hat, cap, nor bonnet, and yet all three, a sort of trinity in unity, under the appellation the ‘Devonshire Whim’. Whenever the Duchess of Devonshire visits the capital, a Standard may be expected to be given to the Fashion. At present scarce any innovation is attempted even in the head-dress. This does not arise from the Town being destitute of Women of elegance; many ladies of the first rank being on the spot; but rather proceeds from the dread each feels that the Taste she may endeavour to take the lead in may be rejected.

Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 21 October 1782

As SOON AS parliament adjourned for the summer Georgiana and the Duke retreated to Bath. They did not return to Devonshire House until the autumn, when the new session was well under way. Accompanying them to London was Lady Elizabeth Foster, described by the papers as the ‘Duchess of Devonshire’s intimate friend’.

Georgiana met Elizabeth, or Bess, as she affectionately called her, during their first week at Bath. The Duke had rented the Duke of Marlborough’s house, one of the finest in town, for the whole summer. The Devonshires were both there to ‘take the cure’: the Duke for his gout, Georgiana for her ‘infertility’ – she had suffered two early miscarriages the previous year.

(#litres_trial_promo) The tone of her letters betrays her misery at having to abandon London just when the Whigs had come to power. She rarely went out and attended few of the balls and nightly concerts in the Assembly Rooms. Twice a day she drank the thermal waters in the King’s Bath, the most fashionable of the three pump rooms. The company there was hardly uplifting, comprising the unfortunate casualties of eighteenth-century living: the incurables, the rheumatics, the gout sufferers, and those afflicted with rampant eczema and other unsightly skin diseases. Georgiana sat each morning in a semicircle near the bar with the other childless wives, cup and saucer in either hand, listening to a band of provincial musicians. Bath was, in her opinion, ‘amazingly disagreeable, I am only surprised at the Duke bearing it all as well as he does, but he is so good natur’d he bears anything well’.

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Two things made life tolerable: watching the new Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons at the Theatre Royal, and the acquaintance of two sisters living in straitened circumstances in an unfashionable part of town. On 1 June Georgiana informed Lady Spencer, ‘Lady Erne and Lady E. Foster are our chief support or else it would be shockingly dull for the D. indeed.’

(#litres_trial_promo) These were the eldest daughters of the Earl of Bristol; Lady Mary Erne was a great friend of Mary Graham, who was probably responsible for the sisters’ introduction to Georgiana. Both were separated from their husbands, and lived with their aunt, a Methodist convert, on the tiny income allocated to them by their father.

Georgiana’s letters to her mother were full of praise for her new friends: ‘You cannot conceive how agreeable and amiable they are, and I never knew people who have more wit and good nature.’

(#litres_trial_promo) But after a short time there was no more mention of Lady Mary Erne, and Lady Elizabeth Foster – Bess – became the sole topic of her correspondence. She was the same age as Georgiana and already the mother of two sons, yet there was something surprisingly girlish about her. Physically, she was the opposite of Georgiana: slimmer, shorter, more delicate, with thin dark hair framing her tiny face. Her appearance of frailty, coupled with a feminine helplessness and coquettish charm, made most men want to protect and possess her. The historian Edward Gibbon, who had known Bess since she was a little girl, described her manners as the most seductive of any woman he knew. ‘No man could withstand her,’ was his opinion. ‘If she chose to beckon the Lord Chancellor from his Woolsack in full sight of the world, he could not resist obedience.’

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Bess’s family, the Herveys, were not the sort that recommended themselves to Lady Spencer. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is alleged to have said: ‘When God created the human race, he created men, women, and Herveys.’