Her letters during these weeks are full of military matters—manoeuvres and parades. In May she wrote to Lady Spencer:
I got up very early and went to the field. The soldiers fir’d very well and I stood by the Duke and Cl Gladwin, who were near enough to have their faces smart with gun-powder, but I was not fortunate enough to have this honour. After the firing was over, Major Revel, whose gout prevents him from walking, sat a horseback to be saluted as General. The Duke of Devonshire took his post at the head of his company, and after marching about they came by Major Revel and saluted him. The D. really does it vastly well. . . .4
By mid-June, however, Georgiana was feeling less welcome on the field: the Duke had grown tired of her presence and the soldiers no longer regarded her as a novelty. She stopped loitering around the guns and reluctantly joined her friends in their card parties, carriage rides, and jolly picnics on the hills overlooking the camp. Over veal cake and tea with Lady Melbourne and Mrs. Crewe she discovered that they too were bored and wished to do more than simply observe the soldiers. Their complaints gave her courage. It occurred to her that even though women were barred from taking part in military action, there was nothing to stop her from organizing a female auxiliary corps. She had soon designed a smart uniform that combined elegance with masculinity, using a tailored version of a man’s riding coat over a close-fitting dress. In July the Morning Post informed its readers: “Her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire appears every day at the head of the beauteous Amazons on Coxheath, who are all dressed en militaire; in the regimentals that distinguish the several regiments in which their Lords, etc., serve, and charms every beholder with their beauty and affability.”5 She continued to parade throughout the summer, inspiring women in other camps to follow suit. The Marchioness of Granby bought a half share in a sixteen-gun ship and had it renamed after her.6
Although Georgiana and her friends did little more than dress up in uniforms and provide good cheer for the men, she had broken with tradition. For the first time aristocratic women organized themselves as a voluntary group, taking up duties to help their men in time of war. Following the publicity they generated Georgiana was particularly gratified by the congratulations she received from the Whig grandees. Her idea of dressing up in patriotic uniforms was a propaganda coup for the Whigs, who had suffered for their opposition to the war. They had been labelled by the press as “Patriots” in reference to Dr. Johnson’s apothegm about patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel. Georgiana’s display of military fervour helped to mitigate the Whigs’ pro-American stance by showing that when the country was in danger, they were as ready to defend it as anyone.
Georgiana’s pleasure at her success was short-lived: one day she discovered that the Duke and Lady Jersey had been taking advantage of her parades through the camp to visit each other’s tents. Possibly jealous of the attention Georgiana was receiving and feeling neglected, the Duke made no effort to keep the affair a secret. Lady Jersey went further and flaunted her conquest in front of Georgiana, who was too frightened and inexperienced to assert herself.7 Lady Jersey regarded all married men—except her husband, who was twice her age—as an irresistible challenge. (When a ribald article appeared about her in the Morning Post in 1777 it shocked only Lord Jersey. They happened to be staying at Chatsworth at the time and he embarrassed everyone by announcing that he loved his wife and would “shew the world he did not believe them.”)8 Lady Jersey always tormented the wives of her conquests, and fond though she was of Georgiana she couldn’t resist the urge to humiliate her friend. According to Lady Clermont, she “asked the Duchess if she could give her a bed [at Coxheath]. She said she was afraid not, the other said, ‘then I will have a bed in your room.’ So that in the house she is to be. Pray, write to the Duchess,” she asked Lady Spencer, “that you hope, in short, I don’t know what . . .”9
Georgiana’s timidity puzzled her mother—although hurt and mortified it seems that she said nothing to either party. For once Lady Spencer showed a certain sensitivity and, instead of remonstrating with her daughter, made an unaccustomed effort to praise her and boost her confidence. “Your behaviour is in every respect just what it ought to be,” she wrote in July, referring to Georgiana’s visit to nearby Tunbridge Wells. A local newspaper had reported that the townspeople felt snubbed by the grandees at Coxheath, so Georgiana attended the Assembly Rooms with Lady Clermont and Mrs. Crewe, where the master of ceremonies welcomed them to much applause. “I believe it with great reason,” Lady Spencer continued, “that if you continue as you have begun you will gain the love and admiration of all who see you.”*10
It was not long, however, before the chiding resumed: “I suspect,” she complained in August, “you put on . . . a great deal more familiarity and ease than is necessary or proper to the men about you.”11 As usual, Lady Spencer’s criticisms were not without cause. “I believe the Dss of D one of the most amiable beings in the world,” Mrs. Montagu wrote after meeting her at Tunbridge Wells. “She has a form and face extremely angelick, her temper is perfectly sweet, she has fine parts, the greatest purity of heart and innocence possible.” But, Mrs. Montagu added, “as goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems, she does not keep so far aloof from the giddy and imprudent part of the World as one could wish.”12
The liaison between Lady Jersey and the Duke was short-lived. Fortunately for Georgiana, Lady Spencer ordered an end to the affair. Angered by Georgiana’s unwillingness to interfere, she had called on Lady Jersey and outlined the consequences she would face if it continued.13 The Spencers also gave the Duke to understand that they were disgusted with him.
By the time the King and Queen made their long-awaited official visit to Coxheath on November 4, 1778, Lady Jersey had acquired a new lover. The rain poured down on the day—“cats and dogs,” Georgiana complained—and while the Duke marched his soldiers past the King, Georgiana led the delegation of ladies standing in slippery mud up to their ankles waiting on the Queen. Georgiana’s discomfort was greatly increased by the onset of what she termed “the Prince,” a common euphemism for menstruation. Although the rain prevented many of the planned manoeuvres from taking place, the newspapers considered the visit a success. According to Georgiana, the Duke of Devonshire was “reckon’d to have saluted the best of anybody.”14 However, the Devonshires’ patriotism did not extend to spending the winter in a mud pit; immediately after the royal visit they returned to Devonshire House.
Georgiana’s sense of isolation had increased as a result of the Duke’s adultery. Her ebullience became a screen which she employed to distance herself from people. She did not mind public occasions, but quiet tête-à-têtes made her uncomfortable and she tried to avoid them, though not always with success. Her reluctance to give offence made her incapable of declining an invitation. “I am to dine with Lady Jersey,” Georgiana wrote to Lady Spencer a few months later. “To tell you the truth tho’ I love her tenderly, I have learnt to feel a kind of uneasiness in being with her, that makes our society very general—I am discontented in being with her and can’t tell her so, et ma bonhomie en souffre.”15* Despite her unease, she continued to behave towards Lady Jersey as if nothing had happened.
Other inhabitants of the camp were less fortunate than Lady Jersey—not all escaped the consequences of their actions so lightly. Lady Melbourne became pregnant with Lord Egremont’s child, while Lady Clermont’s affair with the local apothecary resulted in a secret abortion. But it was Lady Derby and the Duke of Dorset who, in social terms, paid the highest price.16 Lady Mary Coke saw them together in June and rued Lady Derby’s recklessness. She wrote in her diary: “Lady Derby, like the Duchess of Devonshire, has bad connexions which lead her into many things that she had better not do, and for which I am sorry. . . .”17 Her intuition proved correct. In December 1778 Lady Derby fled from her husband’s house, leaving behind her children and all her belongings. It was a widely broadcast secret that she was hiding with the Duke of Dorset. Her desertion broke one of eighteent
h-century society’s strongest taboos regarding the sanctity of the family and a wife’s obedience to her husband. According to Lady Mary Coke, she had “offended against the laws of man and God.”18 She heard that Lady Derby’s brother the Duke of Hamilton was trying to force the Duke of Dorset to sign a legal document agreeing to marry her as soon as the divorce came through. There were other rumours: Lady Derby was pregnant; the Duke of Dorset had made another mistress pregnant; he was now in love with someone else. In February, two months after the initial excitement, Lady Sarah Lennox had this to say to her sister:
It is imagined the Duke of Dorset will marry Lady Derby, who is now in the country keeping quiet and out of the way. There is a sort of party in town of who is to visit her and who is not, which makes great squabbles, as if the curse or blessing of the poor woman depended on a few tickets more or less. . . . I am told she has been and still is more thoroughly attached to the Duke of Dorset, and if so I suppose she will be very happy if the lessening of her visiting list is the only misfortune, and what with giving up her children, sorrow for a fault, and dread of not preserving his affections, I think she is much to be pitied.19
The “party” who went to visit her consisted mostly of the younger generation of Whigs—Lady Carlisle and Lady Jersey in particular. Georgiana was caught between her friends, who sought the additional weight of her celebrity, and her parents, who forbade her to have anything more to do with the unfortunate woman. Everyone was waiting to see what Georgiana would do, said Lady Mary Coke, “lest such bad company should influence her.”20 Georgiana argued that it would be hypocritical of her to turn against Lady Derby. Fearing her father’s temper, she begged Lady Spencer not to tell him of her request to accompany her friends:
I have the greatest horror of her crime, I can not nor do not try to excuse her. But her conduct has been long imprudent, and yet, I have sup’d at her house, and I have enter’d with her into any scheme of amusement, etc., and now it does seem shocking to me, that at the time this poor creature is in distress, that at the time all her grandeur is crush’d around her, I should entirely abandon her, as if I said, I know you was imprudent formerly, but then you had a gay house and great suppers and so I came to you but now that you have nothing of all this, I will avoid you.21
The Spencers disagreed. They gave Georgiana a choice: either she dropped Lady Derby or they would never allow her sister Harriet to visit Devonshire House or Chatsworth. “If you sacrifice so much for a person who was never on a footing of friendship,” wrote Lady Spencer, “what are you to do if Lady J or Lady M should proceed (and they are already far on their way) to the same lengths?”22 Georgiana surrendered, a little relieved to be excused from the unpleasant bickering which surrounded the affair. Lady Carlisle had issued an invitation to a party which included Lady Derby as a test of her friends’ loyalty. For four months society thought about nothing else. Then, in April, Lord Derby announced that he would not be divorcing her. It was a terrible revenge; by his refusal—it was almost impossible for a wife to divorce her husband except on the grounds of non-consummation—he consigned his wife to social limbo, disgraced, separated, and unprotected. Only marriage to the Duke of Dorset would have brought about her social rehabilitation. Their relationship did not survive the strain of her ostracism, confirming Lady Sarah Lennox’s prediction. Two years later Lady Mary Coke recorded a rumour that Lady Derby had left for Italy with a certain Lord Jocelyn, which, she wrote spitefully, merely confirmed her opinion of her.23
The reputation of the Duke of Dorset did not suffer. He had seduced another man’s wife, but while many people looked askance at his behaviour there was no question of excluding him from society. He even remained friends with Lord Derby and continued to be invited to his house. The Derby affair illustrates the point made by Georgiana in The Sylph: eighteenth-century society tolerated anything so long as there was no scandal. Publicly immoral behaviour earned public censure; private transgressions remained whispered gossip. In Lady Spencer’s words, Lady Derby “insulted the World with her Vice.”24
In July 1779, once the season was over, Georgiana went with her parents to Spa. The Duke did not accompany them, pleading military duty, and spent the summer marching his soldiers at the camp. The English and French aristocrats on holiday at Spa behaved as if the two countries were still at peace. Good breeding and fine manners counted for more than martial spirits. Madame de Polignac had been waiting for Georgiana to arrive and they passed the vacation together, walking arm in arm through the wooded fields surrounding the village. They were such conspicuous companions that their friendship reached the notice of the English press. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser reported: “The reigning female favourite of the Queen of France is Madame Polignac, a great encomiast of the English, and a particular admirer of her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire. . . .”25
Above: John, first Earl Spencer, by Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1763. Lord Spencer “seems to be the man whose value few people know,” wrote Viscount Palmerston. “The bright side of his character appears in private and the dark side in public.”
Above: Georgiana, Countess Spencer, by Pompeo Batoni, c. 1764. Georgiana was waiting disconsolately in Amsterdam for her parents to return when this portrait was painted. It shows Lady Spencer surrounded by her interests: books, a musical instrument, and classical ruins.
Photograph of Althorp House. The historian John Evelyn visited Althorp in the seventeenth century and described it as a “noble pile . . . such as may become a great prince.” Lord and Lady Spencer were married at Althorp in 1755, during a ball held to commemorate Spencer’s coming of age.
Lady Spencer with Lady Georgiana Spencer, by Reynolds, c. 1760. Lady Spencer confessed, “I will own I feel so partial to my Dear Little Gee, that I think I shall never love another so well.”
Viscount Althorp with his sisters Lady Georgiana and Lady Henrietta-Frances (Harriet) Spencer, by Angelica Kauffmann, 1774. The portrait was painted just before Georgiana married the Duke of Devonshire.
Chatsworth, west front. Georgiana felt that Chatsworth never really belonged to her. Ho-race Walpole thought it had an air of gloomy grandeur. When the diarist Lord Torrington visited the house, he dismissed it as “vile and uncomfortable.”
The Painted Hall, Chatsworth. Georgiana’s son, the sixth Duke, extensively remodeled this hall to suit his taste for gilt and grandeur. His “improvements” were ripped out in 1912 and the room restored to seventeenth-century designs.
Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana wearing her signature picture hat inspired hundreds of imitations, while the hat was an indispensable prop for the aspiring lady of fashion. The painting itself became an object of fascination in 1876 after it was sold for the then-highest price ever paid for a painting. Soon after the sale the painting was cut from its frame and stolen in an attempt to extort money from its owner. It now resides in the dining room of Chatsworth House.
Fifth Duke of Devonshire, by Pompeo Batoni. The Duke was on the Grand Tour when Batoni painted this portrait. The trip abroad failed to improve his manners: “To be sure the jewell has not been well polished,” wrote Mrs. Delany. “Had he fallen under the tuition of the late Lord Chesterfield he might have possessed les graces, but at present only that of his dukedom belongs to him.”
Marie Antoinette (1755–93), by L. Courniere. The queen was a great friend to Georgiana, whose code name for her was Mrs. Brown. After Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment, Georgiana urged Lafayette to protect her from harm.
Above: Mary Graham, known in society as the “beautiful Mrs. Graham,” by Gainsborough. She and Georgiana wrote passionate letters to each other and secretly exchanged portraits. Georgiana was besotted with Mary until she met Lady Elizabeth Foster while visiting Bath with the Duke of Devonshire.
Above: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Lady Elizabeth Foster, by Jean-Urbain Guérin. Georgiana is in the foreground, resting her hand on Bess’s shoulder.
Lady Elizabeth “Bess” Foster, by Reynolds, 1788, pa
inted after she had been with the Devonshires for six years.
Lady Elizabeth Foster, by Thomas Lawrence, 1802. Georgiana’s love for her friend was undiminished even while the woman was her husband’s mistress. “My dear Bess,” she wrote in 1803. “Do you hear the voice of my heart crying to you? Do you feel what it is for me to be separated from you . . . ?”
A view of Green Park, English School, c. 1760, from Devonshire House looking across the park. Buckingham House is on the right; Spencer House is on the left.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and Lady Georgiana Cavendish, by Joshua Reynolds. Georgiana gave birth to Lady Georgiana, “Little G,” at Devonshire House in the summer of 1783. Instead of giving the child to a wet nurse, Georgiana insisted on breast-feeding the baby herself. In 1804, Little G, by then a mother of two children, told Georgiana, “One cannot know till one has separated from you how different you are from everyone else, how superior to all mothers, even good ones.”
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