Labour
of love for a Diana of the Whig
Boris Johnson muses on the whereabouts
of the modern Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
O Amanda, I say, as we huddle for warmth
on a bench at Paddington station. Alack and fie for our generation!
The Friday afternoon human traffic flows past us on the platform
pinched, put upon. Why are we so anaemic by comparison with
our forebears?
Maybe it's just me but I can't think of anyone nowadays
who lives like her heroine, Georgiana the Duchess of Devonshire.
Amanda Foreman has rediscovered the life of the Queen of
the Ton, as London's high society was known in 1780: the
routs, the revels, the balls that went on into the next day;
her sapphic affair with her husband's mistress, and what
seems to have been a liaison with CJ Fox, not to speak of
the Prince of Wales.
When Georgiana.wore a new hat, the Morning Post consecrated
much space, and the female population instantly chucked their
superseded niillinery. She wrote 100 letters a day, torrentially
explaining her feelings.
"I am so amazed," says the historian, "at
the emotional openness, the moral laxity, and the intellectual
curiosity all in one." We have some modern spirits who
approach Georgiana, in some of her aspects. She was bulimic,
locked in a cold and loveless marriage, and, apart from anything
else, the daughter of Earl Spencer.
"It was sheer fluke," says Amanda. "There
are these weird and uncanny parallels: the star quality and
the incredible talent for self-destruction." But our
Lady Diana Spencer had nothing like the intellectual selfconfidence
of her ancestor, the political fascination, or the gift for
Whig propoganda.
None of the great political hostesses can match her, not
Kay Graham, not Pamela Harriman. Carla Powell may have been
the Pussy Galore of the Referendum Party. But imagine that
Carla owned a house in St James's as big as the Ritz, constantly
churning like a Rowlandson etching with bucks and beauties,
losing fortunes in games of whist and faro.
Then think of her sallying forth during elections, a goddess
dirtying her slippers in the ammonia and rotten wood of the
backstreets, to win votes by kissing butchers, scandalising
the already slack and sated morals of the time. "It
was real Enlightemnent stuff," says Amanda. "The
children of the 1780s were like the 1960s generation, with
this sense that they are better and more intelligent than
anyone else, and then they are utterly crushed, in our generation
by the oil crisis, and in the 18th century by the French
revolution."
Yes. Crushed. We look again at the wretched crowds of commuters.
Death duties and very high tax have done their levelling
work, she says; and now the House of Lords, the last remnant
of the British ancien régime, faces its comeuppance.
"This Government hates history," she says quite
fiercely, "and it hates the reminders of history, and
it's very upsetting and troubling that they seem prepared
to wreck things. These institutions never come back. Normally
you abolish something and that's it."
So I am grateful to Amanda for rescuing Georgiana, or George-ayna,
as she is pronounced,' from the vast letter-caches of Chatsworth
and Althorp. Scotland Yard, the British Library, all the
technology of Oxford Computing, tried in vain to decipher
the blacked-out bits that made her 19th century heirs so
ashamed. It hardly matters.
It is ages since I have so enjoyed a biography, and I'll
eat my hat if it doesn't win the Whitbread next month. A
moderate sized hat, that is, not a "Devonshire".
"I think she's so stunning; she's so gorgeous," she
sighs, looking at the pouting Gainsborough on the jacket. "It
was a labour of love. I was doing it for her. I was out on
a Saturday night five times in a year, and I thought, 'I
am wasting my youth. I am not going to get this back." Now,
though, she feels "a great sense of loss" that
she no longer has Georgiana's voice as her companion, an
agony alleviated, one supposes, by a hardback sale of 15,000.
Amanda is the daughter of Carl Foreman, the American scriptwriter
of High Noon, Young Winston and The Bridge on the River Kwai,
who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and who died
when she was 15. In a way, the book is for him, too.
"I wish I could tell him. He'd be so relieved, because
I was such a disaster at school. He gave me the Penguin History
of the Stuarts and I said I don't want to read it; and of
course, now I look back and it upsets me so much, and I want
to say, 'Look, I did lots of degrees in history and I wrote
a book. . .
Now Arnanda must catch the train for her plane to Scotland
for some rout or revel; and I am left brooding on the lessons
of Georgiana. Yes, things went badly for her and the Whigs.
Fox gave way to Pitt, the stem Tory. The Whig oligarchy disintegrated.
She had one passionate affair too many, and was exiled by
the Duke.
In one sense, Whiggery is again in
the ascendant today. European Union, the ultimate Whig
wheeze, proceeds apace. Lord Jerkins, Whig extraordinaire,
is cock of the walk. Cabinet ministers behave with the
kind of moral laxity that would have boggled Rowlandson.
But where is the fun, the glamour? Where is the modem Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire? Fie, la, alack! etc.
Forward to Telegraph Interview 2
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