Amanda Foreman - The Duchess

Rejected by the Duke, Georgiana once more sought consolation in the fashionable world as soon as the season began. Newspapers speculated on how long she could keep up the frantic pace of her life before her health collapsed. 54 They only had to wait a couple of months. In April 1776 Georgiana went into premature labour. No one was surprised by her miscarriage. ‘The Duchess of Devonshire lies dangerously ill,’ reported the Morning Post , ‘and we hear the physicians have ascribed her indisposition to the reigning fashionable irregularities of the age.’ 55 The next day it claimed with gloomy pleasure that the physicians had given up and her death was imminent.

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.’ 56 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, * 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. 57

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.’ 58

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.

*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.

*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.

*£80,000 in today’s money.

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.’ 1 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. 2 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.’ 3