The Duchess

Georgiana denied the prophets of doom their satisfaction, but her recovery was much slower than it should have been. She was harbouring a secret: she was deeply in debt. She had placed all hope of repaying her gambling dues in the birth of the lost child, positive that the Duke would forgive her in the general glow of happiness. Now that her plans had gone awry she had no idea what to do and the worry affected her health. She was not the first woman to find herself in such a predicament; it was a popular theme in the press. The Guardian was blunt: ‘The Man who plays beyond his income, pawns his Estate; the Woman must find something else to Mortgage when her Pin Money is gone. The Husband has his Lands to dispose of; the Wife, her Person.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Georgiana could not even bring herself to think how she might tell the Duke or her mother that her gambling debts amounted to at least £3,000,

(#ulink_d85860eb-3608-5a32-bab8-66677decbe54) when her pin money came to £4,000 a year. Like everyone else, the Duke blamed the miscarriage on her reckless living.

In July Georgiana’s creditors threatened to apply directly to the Duke, which frightened her into confessing the truth to her parents. They were so angry that Lady Clermont felt obliged to intercede on her behalf:

The conversation you had with the Duchess made so great an impression on her that it made her quite ill. She has not seen anybody since she came to town, except myself, not one of the set. I am convinced she will be very different in everything. She goes to you this evening to stay till the Duke returns from Newmarket. I do beg you will not say any more to her. Look in good spirits whether you are or not, try this for once. For God’s Sake don’t let Lord Spencer say anything to her. I would give the World to go to Wimbledon and not to Newmarket but that is impossible. I told her today that if I could ever be of the least use to her, let me be in France or whatever part of the world I was in, I should go to her. I am sorry. I love her so much.

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The Spencers listened to Lady Clermont’s plea for calm. They paid Georgiana’s debts but insisted that she reveal everything to the Duke. When she told him, falteringly and with many tears, he hardly said a word. He promptly repaid her parents and then never referred to the matter again. This unnerved Georgiana more than a display of anger. After a measured period of silence Lady Spencer began writing to her daughter again. She had suffered a profound shock on discovering that Georgiana hid things from her, and she no longer felt so confident about their relationship. ‘Pray take care if you play to carry money in your pocket as much as you care to lose and never go beyond it,’ she repeated. ‘If you stick to commerce and play carefully I think you will not lose more than you can afford, but I beg you will never play quinze or lou, and I shall be very glad if you will tell me honestly in each letter what you have won or lost and at what games every day.’

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For the first time since Georgiana’s marriage two years earlier Lady Spencer sensed that she was losing her hold over her daughter and she feared for the future.

* (#ulink_f5002518-fd63-56ed-9b54-95c19e36f8a8) When French visitors attended aristocratic dinners they had difficulty with the table forks, and the English predilection for toasts bored them witless. Regarding the former, the usual complaint, as expressed by Faujas de Saint-Fond, was that they ‘prick my mouth or my tongue with their little sharp steel tridents’. Regarding the latter, it was their inordinate number. The practice of proposing and replying continued throughout the dinner and with even more vigour after the women had left. Toasting the ladies, the food, each other and whatever else came to mind went on for so long there were chamber pots in each corner, and ‘the person who has occasion to use it does not even interrupt his talk during the operation’. André Parreaux, Daily Life, p. 36.

* (#ulink_ecefc0c5-ff58-5459-adfe-f1a2b345cc37) On one occasion she met the celebrated Dr Johnson, who was visiting a friend in the neighbourhood. The Devonshires were as gratified to be in his presence as he was in theirs. Georgiana was awed by his conversation but, she noted, ‘he din’d here and does not shine quite so much in eating as in conversing, for he ate much and nastily.’ Chatsworth MSS 644: GD to LS, 4–10 September 1784. Nevertheless, she sat next to him throughout the day and, according to Nathaniel Wraxall, was ‘hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson’s lips … All the cynic moroseness of the philosopher and moralist seemed to dissolve under so flattering [an] approach.’ Nathaniel Wraxall, Posthumous and Historical Memoirs of My Own Time (London 1904), I, pp. 113–14.

* (#ulink_d6c29770-f829-50bf-9bd4-638d48c70806) £80,000 in today’s money.

3 The Vortex of Dissipation1776–1778 (#ulink_c2f4d0a1-8374-5e47-abf6-3fcc52feea48)

Gaming among the females at Chatsworth has been carried to such a pitch that the phlegmatic Duke has been provoked to express at it and he has spoken to the Duchess in the severest terms against a conduct which has driven many from the house who could not afford to partake of amusements carried on at the expense of £500 or £1000 a night.

Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Wednesday 4 September 1776

As you are the loveliest and best tempered woman in his Majesty’s dominions, learn to be the most prudent and wise. If you do, your dominion will be universal, and you will have nothing to lament, but that you have no more worlds to conquer.

Editorial addressed to Georgiana, Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 4 July 1777

‘COMING HERE has made a strong impression on me,’ Georgiana wrote during a visit to the Devonshires’ Londesborough estate in October 1776. ‘Alas,’ she continued, ‘I can’t help but make an unhappy comparison between the emotions I experienced two years ago during my first visit, and what I feel now.’

(#litres_trial_promo) She was suffering from a profound sense of disillusionment, not only with her marriage but also with fashionable life.

For those who could moderate their pursuit of pleasure, Whig society was sophisticated, tolerant and cosmopolitan. Whigs prided themselves on their patronage of the arts as much as they venerated their contribution to statecraft. They were the oligarchs of taste, proselytizers of their superior cultivation. But the ton, by definition, inhabited the realm of the extreme. Moderation was not a part of its world: elegance bowed to artifice, pleasure gave way to excess. ‘You must expect to be class’d with the company you keep,’ was Lady Spencer’s constant warning to Georgiana.

(#litres_trial_promo) Embarrassed by her own previous association with the ton, Lady Spencer nursed a visceral dislike towards its members. She regarded it as a magnet for the least respectable elements of her class, and Georgiana’s friends as the worst among the bad.

The people who gathered around Georgiana and the Duke shared an attachment to the Whig party, a worldly attitude, a passion for the theatre and a love of scandal. Fashion was the only ‘career’ open to aristocratic women; politics the only ‘trade’ that a man of rank might pursue. Georgiana’s friends engaged in both regardless of their sex. Women aspired to be political hostesses of note, men to be arbiters of taste. Their collective ambition and competitiveness made them distinct even within the ton, and it was not long before society labelled the habitués of Devonshire House the ‘Devonshire House Circle’. All Whigs were welcome, of course, but the older, staider members felt ill at ease among the more rakish elements. Edmund Burke, then approaching the height of his influence within the party as its philosopher and propagandist, almost never went except to accompany his patron, the Marquess of Rockingham. Devonshire House was too frivolous and louche for him, and its casual attitude towards sexual misconduct made the middle-class Irishman uncomfortable. Some of the men took a delight in being overtly crude, as the following wager illustrates: ‘Ld Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Ld Derby, to receive 500 Gs. whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a Balloon one thousand yards from Earth.’

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Those who embraced the Circle maintained a lofty disdain for the world outside.

(#ulink_fcd89c11-83a9-5cea-88a1-5f851ee389bd) Serious Devonshire House acolytes identified themselves by their imitation of the Cavendish drawl. By now Georgiana never spoke in any other way and the more it became one of her personal mannerisms, the more compelling it was to her admirers. What began as playful mimicry evolved with popular usage into a kind of dialect, called the ‘Devonshire House Drawl’. It has been characterized as part baby-talk, part refined affectation: hope was written and pronounced as ‘whop’; you became ‘oo’. Vowels were compressed and extended so that cucumber became ‘cowcumber’, yellow ‘yaller’, gold ‘goold’, and spoil rhymed with mile. Stresses fell on unexpected syllables, such as bal-cony instead of bal-cony and con-template.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the middle of the next century all Whigs would speak in the Drawl, transforming a family tradition into a symbol of political allegiance, but in Georgiana’s time it remained the Circle’s own patois. Lord Pelham was moved to warn a friend: ‘I hope you will love the Dss and forgive some of her peculiarities – but above all do not adopt their manners … I have never known anybody that has lived much with them without catching something of their manner.’

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At its broadest the Circle numbered more than a hundred people; at its most intimate, thirty. In modern terms they were London’s ‘café society’: the racier members of the aristocracy mixed with professional artists and actors, scroungers, libertines and wits. The playwright and arch-scrounger Richard Brinsley Sheridan was one of its stars. An incorrigible drinker, womanizer and plotter, he embodied the best and worst of the Circle. He was brilliant yet lazy, kind-hearted and yet remiss over honouring his debts to the point of dishonesty. Sheridan disliked paying his creditors on the grounds that ‘paying only encourages them’. He once shook his head at the sight of a friend settling his account, saying, ‘What a waste …’

(#litres_trial_promo) He was introduced to Georgiana through his wife, the beautiful and talented singer Elizabeth Linley. Then at the pinnacle of her career, Elizabeth consented to perform at Devonshire House so long as she could be accompanied by her husband. Sheridan’s sole success at the time, The Rivals, did not gain him an invitation on his own account. Notwithstanding his inauspicious introduction as Elizabeth’s escort, Sheridan worked feverishly to ingratiate himself into the Circle. He made it his business to be entertaining, to be useful, to know every secret and to have a hand in every intrigue. Having secured his place, he encouraged his wife to relinquish her career and only the very fortunate heard her sing again.

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David Garrick was another celebrated theatrical member of the Circle. After watching him give a pre-supper performance, Georgiana wrote: ‘I have no terms to express the horror of Mr Garrick’s reading Macbeth. I have not recovered yet, it is the finest and most dreadful thing I ever saw or heard, for his action and countenance is as expressive and terrible as his voice. It froze my blood as I heard him …’

(#litres_trial_promo) Second to Garrick in celebrity was the sculptress Mrs Damer, whose heads of Father Thames and the goddess Isis still adorn Henley Bridge. Rumour hinted that she had lesbian tendencies although there was a more obvious explanation for the failure of her marriage: the Hon. John Damer was a pathetic drunk and gamester. In August 1775 he shot himself through the head in a room above the Bedford Arms at Covent Garden after having ruined them both in a single night.

The Craufurd brothers – the francophile James, known as ‘Fish’ because he could be extraordinarily selfish, and Quentin, known as ‘Flesh’ – were renowned connoisseurs of art whose presence lent an intellectual quality to Devonshire House suppers. Their conversational skill was matched by the famous wit James Hare, Georgiana’s particular favourite. ‘He has a manner of placing every object in so new a light,’ she explained to her mother, ‘that his kind of wit always surprises as much as it pleases.’

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(#litres_trial_promo) Hare was also discreet and trustworthy – rare attributes, Georgiana discovered, in the Devonshire House world. Even the ‘mere’ politicians of the Circle were celebrated for their other achievements, like the playwright and satirist General Richard Fitzpatrick, who wrote the enormously successful Rolliad. Georgiana also felt a special affection for the Whig politician and bibliophile Thomas Grenville, who reputedly never married because of his hopeless love for her. These conquerors of the drawing room were joined by such sportsmen as the Duke of Dorset who, when he was not making a reputation for himself as the debaucher of other men’s wives, transformed cricket into the national game. The Earl of Derby, whose wife was one of Dorset’s conquests, and Lord Clermont promoted British horse racing with the establishment of the Oaks and the Derby.

The women, who were no less extraordinary, divided into those who were received by polite society and those who were not. The socially proscribed women included Georgiana’s cousin Lady Diana Spencer, who had committed adultery with Topham Beauclerk in order to provoke her violent husband Lord Bolingbroke into divorcing her. Although an outcast in society, Lady Diana enjoyed equal status at Devonshire House with the ‘beauties’ and celebrated hostesses. Among these were Lady Clermont, a great favourite at Versailles, Lady Derby, who had once hoped to marry the Duke of Devonshire, and Lady Jersey, who used her ‘irresistible seduction and fascination’ to wreck the marriages of her friends. According to a contemporary, she was ‘clever, unprincipled, but beautiful and fascinating’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Bouverie, whom Reynolds painted to much acclaim, and the conversationalist Mrs Crewe completed the inner group of respectable women. They were highly competitive and spent much of their time putting one another down. Although greatly respected by her politician friends, and a confidante of Edmund Burke, Mrs Crewe was dismissed by Lady Douglas as ‘very fat with a considerable quantity of visible down about her mouth … her ideas came so quick that [Lady Douglas] could not follow them, nor she believed Mrs Crewe herself’.

Lady Spencer had mixed feelings about the female members of the Circle, but she loathed one woman in particular: Lady Melbourne. Beautiful, clever and ruthless, Lady Melbourne epitomized the decadence of Georgiana’s friends. The incurable gossip Lord Glenbervie recorded in his diary, ‘it was a very general report and belief that … Lord Coleraine sold Lady Melbourne to Lord Egremont for £13,000, that both Lady and Lord Melbourne were parties to this contract and had each a share of the money.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The story might even have been true. Lord Melbourne was an enigma, a silent figure in the drawing room whom visitors to Melbourne House barely noticed. Once Lady Melbourne had presented him with an heir he allowed her the freedom to do and see whom she pleased. He also profited by it. She was not a woman to give her affections indiscriminately. Through her efforts Lord Melbourne was made a viscount in 1781, and later a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in the Prince of Wales’s household. Two of her five children were the offspring of Lord Egremont; another, George, the result of her affair with the Prince of Wales. Only the eldest and possibly the youngest were Lord Melbourne’s.

Before Georgiana’s entry into the ton Lady Melbourne had reigned as its leading hostess. People naturally assumed that they would become rivals, but Lady Melbourne had no intention of setting herself up in opposition to Georgiana. She befriended her and adopted the role of benign older counsel instead. ‘My dearest Thémire’ (the French term for Themis, the Goddess of Justice) was how Georgiana usually addressed her. Lady Melbourne was a natural manager of people. She had a firm grasp of the recondite laws which governed life within the ton, and an unsentimental, even cynical view of humanity. ‘Never trust a man with another’s secret,’ she is reputed to have said, ‘never trust a woman with her own.’ Ferociously practical and discreet, she could also be sarcastic and cutting when irritated. Georgiana was in awe of her temper; ‘I believe I have been a little afraid of you,’ she once admitted.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Pray write to me, tell me that you love me and are not angry with me,’ she pleaded on another occasion.

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Lady Melbourne provided the comradeship that was missing in Georgiana’s relationship with her mother. Lady Spencer was always commenting and offering advice, but it was hardly ever of the practical kind that could help her daughter out of scrapes. She was too far removed from the Circle to understand the sort of pressures that it exerted. Jealous of Lady Melbourne’s influence, she tried to make Georgiana drop her. Uncharacteristically, Georgiana refused to obey:

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.

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Throughout 1777 a series of anonymous publications appeared addressed to Georgiana, some of them attacking her slavish devotion to fashion, others defending her.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.