By 1779,
the year Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, turned twenty-two,
she was the most talked-about woman in Great Britain. Her
novel "The Sylph", which depicted the sexual license
and callousness of her fast set of friends, had gone through
four printings, and she had served as the model for Lady
Teazle in Richard Sheridan's "The School for Scandal".
Wax casts of Georgiana, "intended as ornaments to mansions",
were for sale alongside likenesses of the Prince of Wales;
milliners made fans decorated with her portrait; she was
nearly crushed by crowds when she appeared in public places
such as the pleasure gardens at Ranelagh. Her extravagant
costumes and her outlandish hats and hairdos which might
rise as much as three feet above her head and feature a ship
in full sail or a pastoral scene with sheep and trees were
more assiduously chronicled than those of any other aristocrat
in England. She was a confidante, and perhaps a lover, of
the country's most charismatic politician, Charles James
Fox, and was the closest friend of the debauched, hysterics
prone Prince of Wales ("Prinny" to his pals, "dearest
brother" to her). The vivacious Duchess of Devonshire,
in sum, was "the glass and model of fashion" and
the uncontested leader of that early form of cafe society
called the "ton" an amalgam of writers, actors,
politicians, racy aristocrats, and assorted libertines which,
although it may not have included more than a thousand persons,
set all standards of taste in Great Britain in the last decades
of the eighteenth century.
As we learn in Amanda Foreman's riveting new biography, "Georgiana:
Duchess of Devonshire" (Random House; $29.95), the
willowy, russethaired charmer not only was a great beauty
in every sense superb except for her somewhat bulging eyes
but was also considered the most warmhearted woman in the
realm. She was noted for her generosity to charities and
friends alike, and famous for her capacity to make those
she addressed feel as if they were the center of the world.
So it seems all the more odd that the only man who did
not appear to be smitten by the Duchess was her indolent,
taciturn, prodigiously self-absorbed husband, William Cavendish,
fifth Duke of Devonshire. He was one of the wealthiest
nobles in the nation, the owner of a magnificent art collection
and many mansions (including Devonshire House and the legendary
Chatsworth), yet his idea of a good time was to drink and
play cards with his cronies at Brooks's, the exclusive
club where he dined nightly, year in, year out, on a broiled
bladebone of mutton.
Devonshire, one of twenty-eight English dukes who were
superseded in rank only by royalty, had been a great catch,
although the genetic credentials of Lady Georgiana Spencer,
the oldest child of the Earl and Countess Spencer, were
almost as estimable. Like her great-great-great-great-niece
Diana, Princess of Wales, who would share with her a love
of risk, a deep insecurity, a magical rapport with crowds,
and the tendency to eclipse a chilly husband, Georgiana
was brought up at the family seat of Althorp, where the
Spencers had lived since the sixteenth century. Her parents
were a highly cultivated and unusually faithful couple
who instilled in their children that cult of sentiment
which burgeoned in Europe in the wake of Rousseau and Sterne.
They encouraged Georgiana's love of performance, and she
grew up anxiously striving to please, delighting her mother
and father with her natural grace and her swift talent
for mastering Latin, music, foreign languages, and the
intricacies of court etiquette.
Aged sixteen when she was affianced to the monosyllabic
twenty-four-year old Duke, Georgiana naively assumed that
her marriage, like her parents', would offer bonds of shared
emotions and intellectual pursuits. No such luck. The Duke,
whose milliner girlfriend, unbeknownst to his wife, was
suckling his newborn daughter in a country cottage as he
took his wedding vows, looked on Georgiana merely as good
breeding stock. His notion of marital affection was to
barge into his bride's room after his stint at Brooks's
was over and make a determined effort to produce an heir.
Faced with such conjugal frustrations, a woman of Georgiana`s
temperament and resources tends to find ways to rechannel
her energies. Georgiana found solace in gambling, and particularly
in the popular game of faro, which became her favorite
diversion. She turned Devonshire House into London's most
exclusive gambling club, even charging professional faro
dealers fifty guineas a night, illegally, for the right
to set up tables there.
Foreman puts this passion of Georgiana's in a historical
perspective, reminding us that gambling was to the eighteenth-century
British aristocracy what gin was to the lower classes:
the yearly ruin of thousands of families, and a frequent
cause for suicide. Moreover, the Duchess's entourage was
notably devoid of any role models who could have kept her
from the gaming table. Her parents had hired instructors
in order to learn winning tactics for faro; her beloved
sister Harriet, Lady Duncannon (later Countess of Bessborough),
a great beauty and wit in her own right, was also a compulsive
gambler, as was the Prince of Wales. Georgiana's friend
Charles Fox had been known to spend thirty-six consecutive
hours at the gaming table, but was fortunate in having
an excessively indulgent father, Lord Holland, who covered
a whopping hundred and forty thousand pounds (nearly fourteen
million contemporary dollars) of his son's accumulated
debts. Georgiana had no such support. Religion had replaced
gambling in the life of the loving but stifling Lady Spencer
by the time her daughter married, and she had little to
offer except sermons.
Within two years of Georgiana's marriage, her arrears
amounted to three thousand pounds (two hundred and ninety-seven
thousand dollars), almost the equivalent of the yearly
allowance given her by her husband. The Duke grudgingly
covered these debts, but he was under constant pressure
from his siblings, the rapacious Cavendishes, to rein his
wife in. Too gentle, too genial, and too cowardly to endure
confrontations, Georgiana began to entangle herself in
a network of lies and mounting debts (often owed to fraudulent
bankers), which plagued her for the rest of her life. Foreman
notes that the anxieties and depressions caused by these
debts may well have been linked to the extreme manner in
which Georgiana alternated eating binges with bouts of
total starvation, and also to her very frequent miscarriages.
It was evident that the Duke, to whom the continuance of
the Cavendish dynasty was a form of religious obsession,
had married her for two simple reasons: to maintain his
family's interests and to produce an heir, and five years
into their marriage she was proving incapable of fullfilling
either goal.
It is in the context of this anguish that one must see
the ascendance in Georgiana's life of the ambitious Lady
Elizabeth Foster. The Devonshires first met Lady Foster
Bess to her intimates in the summer of 1782, while taking
the cure at Bath. She was the second daughter of the notably
avaricious Earl-Bishop of Bristol, and had made a rotten
marriage, in her teens, with a dissolute Irish M.P. After
Bess learned that he had seduced her maid, the couple had
separated, and she had found herself, according to the
laws of the time, without a penny (her indifferent father
refused her any material support), and without any visiting
rights to her two sons. Frail, with dark hair framing a
tiny oval face, fluent in French and Italian, and displaying
a cultivated air of feminine helplessness, she emanated
such sinuous, coquettish charm that no man, according to
Edward Gibbon, "could withstand her."
For the sentimental, magnanimous Georgiana, it was love
at first sight. Poor Bess, so sensitive, so vulnerable,
so mistreated! Georgiana readily persuaded the Duke, whose
milliner had recently died, to be equally smitten. Within
a few months of their meeting, Bess part best friend and
confidante, part paid companion moved into the Devonshire
household. With the Duke, who loved to have two women competing
for his attention, she was submissive and flirtatious;
with the Duchess, whom she both envied and revered, she
was endlessly attentive, offering a passionate emotional
relationship of a kind that Georgiana had never enjoyed
with men. The three had a coded language of their own,
in part taken from the patois of the London ton ("How
do oo do"), in part devised by them: the Duke was
Canis because of his great love of dogs, the Duchess and
Bess were Rat and Racky, Charles Fox was the Eyebrow. And
Bess not withstanding frequent trips to the Continent,
where the Devonshires often sent her to improve her health
and to care for the Duke's illegitimate daughter apparently
enhanced the spouses' domestic functioning. For in 1783,
after nine years of marriage, the Duchess finally brought
a child successfully to term. It was a girl, alas, but
at least she heightened the Duke's hopes for a male heir.
The threesome's mutual devotion grew apace, and two years
after Georgiana's first daughter was born both women were
pregnant by the Duke. Bess, bitterly aware that she and
the Duchess must have conceived within days or hours of
each other, was sent off to France by the Duke. "Oh
Bess," the blissfully ignorant Georgiana wrote upon
being separated from her "dearest, ever ever dearest" friend, "every
sensation I feel but heightens my adoration of you." Were
Georgiana and Bess lovers in a homosexual sense? The women's
correspondence has been so heavily censored by their descendants
that the question will never be resolved. Foreman emphasizes
that our more rigid notions of gender relations should
not be imposed upon a culture whose expressions of sexuality
might have been considerably more androgynous than ours.
But to dwell exclusively on the psychosexual machinations
of the Devonshires' ménage, which many readers may
find the most fascinating aspect of Foreman`s biography,
would be to overlook that sizable portion which offers
a panorama of British politics in the age of William Pitt
the Younger, and focuses on Georgiana`s activity in the
Whig Party. It is. one of the few constructive activities
that the Duchess could trace to her husband. The Cavendishes,
who regarded themselves as divinely appointed protectors
of British constitutional liberty, had been leaders of
the Whig Party ever since they had helped to overthrow
the Catholic James II and secured the British throne for
his Protestant daughter and son-in law, Mary and William
of Orange. It was at the urging of the Duke's friend Charles
Fox, the rotund, blustering star of the Whigs' liberal
wing, that Georgiana was persuaded to enter into the thick
of politics.
In the election of 1784, when the Whigs hoped to return
to power, Georgiana campaigned vigorously for Fox`s election
as M.P for the district of Westminster. She used populist
tactics unheard of for a member of her class and gender,
chatting with merchants over pints of ale and tipples of
gin, hugging women and children in the streets, and becoming
godmother to dozens of infants in return for political
support. Although Foreman may be exaggerating when she
claims that her subject was "the first woman to conduct
a modern electoral campaign", the warmth and intimacy
of Georgiana`s manner did cause her to be lampooned in
dozens of cartoons hinting that she was exchanging sexual
favors for votes.
Still, Georgiana's political prominence was hardly a remedy
for the Devonshires' dynastic anxieties. The issue of a
male heir became all the more pressing for the Duchess
in 1788, fourteen years into her marriage, when Bess went
abroad again, to give birth to a Devonshire-sired son,
Augustus Clifford. This time, she travelled with the serene
acquiescence of Georglana, who had fallen in love with
the rising political star Charles Grey. The following year,
Georgiana, too, became pregnant by the Duke, and she must
have sensed that the stakes had never been so high. By
now, even Bess was cheering for a legitimate male heir,
knowing full well that her future depended on the survival
of the Devonshires' marriage. Georgiana, terrified that
pressure from her British creditors might cause her to
miscarry, decided to have her baby in France, the turmoil
of the French Revolution notwithstanding.
In May, 1790, as revolutionary fervor was mounting across
the country, the family awaited the child's arrival in
a friend's house outside of Paris. So brilliantly does
Foreman build up the suspense that even the most heartless
reader will cheer with relief at the appearance of the
Marquis of Hartington, the future sixth Duke of Devonshire,
who would inherit all his father's glorious estates and
remain a bachelor. Like Georgiana, he became a much beloved
host and patron of the arts and enjoyed close friendships
with members of his own sex, maintaining a lifelong attachment
to one of the century's distinguished architects and gardeners,
Joseph Paxton.
Georgiana`s last decade was her darkest. In 1791, both
she and Bess were exiled by the angry Duke when he learned
that Georgiana was pregnant with Charles Grey's child.
She gave birth to a daughter in France, with Bess in loving
attendance. His Grace's displeasure lasted nearly two years.
It was a difficult time for both women, who suffered greatly
from not seeing their children. Soon after coming home,
Georgiana learned, with immense sorrow, that the future
Earl Grey, who as Prime Minister would expand the voting
rights of Britons through the Great Reform Act of 1832,
was planning to marry the young heiress Mary Ponsonby.
(The couple eventually had fifteen children.) In characteristically
amiable fashion, Georgiana found no better way of consoling
herself for the loss of her lover than to turn his wife
into one of her closest friends. She continued to write
voluminously-verse, essays, dramas-and composed a song
for Sheridan`s play "Pizarro", which ran for
an unprecedented thirty-one nights. She also took up chemistry,
attended lectures at the Royal Academy, and became a gifted
amateur mineralogist.
Then, in the late seventeen-nineties, Georgiana suffered
dreadful eye infections. They left her half blind and disfigured,
and she ventured far less into society. In the first months
of 1806, she enjoyed a last, shining moment as the darling
of the Whig Party, having played an important role in the
formation of a new Cabinet, which included several of her
intimates her brother George Spencer as Home Secretary,
Charles Grey as First Lord of the Admiralty, Fox as Foreign
Secretary and Sheridan as Treasurer to the Navy. She died
later that year, at the age of forty-eight, after a brief,
painful bout of jaundice, ever tortured by her creditors
and by a long list of debts that she had never confessed
to her husband. "The best-natured and best-bred woman
in England is gone," the Prince of Wales lamented.
Few of Georgiana`s friends mourned her more deeply than
Bess, whose future at Devonshire House the Duchess had
thoughtfully secured in her will by making her the sole
guardian of her papers. When, three years after Georgiana`s
death, the Duke of Devonshire took Bess as his wife, he
proceeded to give her a taste of what Georgiana had endured
by immediately taking on a new mistress. However, he died
two years later, before the mistress could pose a threat.
And the second Duchess of Devonshire, having tried, but
pathetically failed, to emulate Georgiana's success in
London society, moved to Rome, where she became involved
with a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. The principal
difficulty of this scholarly, serious, and marvellously
diverting book is that the bloodlines criss-crossing throughout
the narrative are further confused by the insane pace of
the main characters' coupling. Upon learning, for example,
that perhaps only one of the five children of Lady Melbourne,
Georgiana's rival as doyenne of London`s fast set, was
conceived by her husband, or that Georgiana's sister Harriet,
shortly after concluding a tryst with the rakish Richard
Sheridan, became impregnated, at the age of thirty-nine,
by a lover twelve years her junior, who then proceeded
to wed her niece, Harryo, Georgiana`s second daughter,
readers may feel as if they were visiting a kennel of purebreds
run amok.
But such extravagances are among the vicarious pleasures
of the book: the opulence of libido, the Olympian sense
of privilege, the sheer scale of the physical appurtenances
(the thousands of acres landscaped by "Capability" Brown,
the four ships it took to carry the Devonshire`s personnel
and possessions when they crossed the Channel, the paintings
and drawings by Tintoretto, Veronese, Rembrandt, and Rubens
and, notably, Poussin`s "Et in Arcadia Ego" hanging
on the walls of Chatsworth and Devonshire House). Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, had her misfortunes, but reading
about her life might make many twenty-first-century Americans
feel like sad little Puritans who've missed out on a great
deal of fun.
Surely, Georgiana's intelligence,
wit, and angelic magnanimity made her amply deserving
of every ounce of fun she had.
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