The Duchess

by Amanda Foreman

  In supporting the Whigs against his father the Prince was following an established tradition among the Hanoverians. From George I onwards, father and son had hated each other. Each successive Prince of Wales had thrown in his lot with the opposition, and the future George IV was no different from his predecessors. He feared and resented his parents while they despised him as weak, duplicitous, and lazy. Georgiana recorded her first impressions of him in a scrapbook, which she entitled “Annecdotes Concerning HRH the Prince of Wales.” Knowing that the memoir would be seen only by future generations she was absolutely candid in her opinion of him:

  The Prince of Wales is rather tall, and has a figure which, though striking is not perfect. He is inclined to be too fat and looks too much like a woman in men’s clothes, but the gracefulness of his manner and his height certainly make him a pleasing figure. His face is very handsome, and he is fond of dress even to a tawdry degree, which young as he is will soon wear off. His person, his dress and the admiration he has met with . . . take up his thoughts chiefly. He is good-natured and rather extravagant . . . but he certainly does not want for understanding, and his jokes sometimes have the appearance of wit. He appears to have an inclination to meddle with politics—he loves being of consequence, and whether it is in intrigues of state or of gallantry he often thinks more is intended than really is.53

  He was clever, well read, and possessed of exquisite taste in art and decoration, but he was wholly deficient in self-knowledge. Following the King’s orders the Prince had been isolated from companions of his own age and tutored by dry old men who saw to it that his life was one long regime of worthy activities. But instead of creating a paragon of virtue, the Prince’s strict and joyless upbringing had made him vain, petulant, and attention-seeking. As soon as he could he rebelled against everything he had been taught. The King relaxed the cordon sanitaire around the Prince when he turned eighteen only to the extent of holding a few private balls for him, “from which I and many others were banished,” wrote Georgiana, “as no opposition person was asked”—which only increased his desire to mix with people who did not meet with his parents’ approval.

  “As he only went out in secret, or with the King and Queen,” she also recorded, “he formed very few connections with any other woman other than women of the town.” On his first trip to the theater in 1779 he saw The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane, and immediately fell in love with the twenty-one-year-old actress Mary Robinson, a protégée of Georgiana’s. She was delighted to conduct a very public affair with him, and even went so far as to emblazon a simulacrum of his crest—three feathers—on her carriage. The Prince foolishly wrote her explicit letters, in which he called her “Perdita”—her role in the play—and signed himself “Florizel.” Like any astute woman on the make, she kept his adolescent declarations—he promised her a fortune as soon as he came of age—and blackmailed him when he grew tired of her.

  It was during the Prince’s visits to Drury Lane that he first came into contact with the Devonshire House Circle, and in particular with Georgiana and Fox. George III blamed Fox for deliberately and calculatingly debauching his son, but he had no malicious intent. The Prince had already started to drink and gamble before he met Fox, who simply showed him how to do it in a more refined way. The Prince worshipped Fox who, for his part, genuinely liked the boy, despite the thirteen-year age gap, seeing in him, perhaps, something of his younger, reckless self. The two made an unlikely pair, one of them dressed in exquisite finery, the other unwashed, unshaven, his clothes askew and his linen soiled. On most nights they could be found either at Brooks’s or Devonshire House, playing faro until they fell asleep at the table.

  The Prince’s marked attentions to Georgiana, the fact that he constantly sought her advice on every matter—from his clothes to his relations with his father—fanned rumours that they were having an affair. Nathaniel Wraxall was loath to characterize it definitely, and ventured no further than saying, “of what nature was that attachment, and what limits were affixed to it by the Duchess, must remain a matter of conjecture.”54 The Prince was almost certainly in love with Georgiana, but she never reciprocated his feelings. Throughout their lives they always addressed each other as “my dearest brother” and “sister,” although the Prince was often madly jealous of rivals.55 It was his lack of success with Georgiana, when every other woman in Whig society (including, it was rumoured, Harriet) was his for the asking, that made her so irresistible to him.

  The Prince shared with Fox, Lord Cholmondeley, and Lord George Cavendish a round robin of the three most famous courtesans of the era: Perdita, Grace Dalrymple, and Mrs. Armistead. Georgiana heard that Lord George had paid a drunken visit to Mrs. Armistead one night only to find the Prince hiding behind a door. Luckily, rather than take offence he burst out laughing, made him a low bow, and left. The Prince also pursued Lady Melbourne and Lady Jersey, or perhaps it was the other way round. Less well-informed people speculated that Georgiana was in competition with her friends for the Prince’s affection, but a letter from Lady Melbourne suggests collusion rather than rivalry:

  The Duke of Richmond has been here, and told me you and I were two rival queens, and I believe, if there had not been some people in the room, who might have thought it odd, that I should have slapped his face for having such an idea; and he wished me joy of having the Prince to myself. How odious people are, upon my life, I have no patience with them. I believe you and I are very different from all the rest of the world—as from their ideas they do such strange things in certain situations or they never could suspect us in the way they do.56

  The Whigs continued their onslaught against the government. On June 3, 1780, the Duke of Richmond, then a radical on the extreme left of the party, moved a resolution that the constitution should be rewritten to allow annual parliaments and universal suffrage. His plan was based on the proposals drawn up by the Westminster Association, an offshoot of Christopher Wyvill’s Association Movement which had led the petitions for parliamentary reform. By an unlucky chance, while the Lords were debating the Duke of Richmond’s proposals, Lord George Gordon, a mentally unbalanced Protestant fanatic, chose to march on Parliament at the head of a large mob. He carried with him a petition from the Protestant Association, a sectarian body which opposed giving legal rights to Catholics.

  Eighteenth-century society was rarely bothered by the occasional eruptions of the lower orders; the establishment ignored them and the fracas would die down of its own accord. But this mob, intoxicated by drink and whipped up by a crazed demagogue, was more dangerous than the usual over-excited rabble. The crowd blocked all the entrances to Parliament while Lord George Gordon stormed into the Commons. The MPs fell silent at his entrance and sat spellbound as he harangued them on the evils of popery. He then rushed out to do the same in the Lords. In between speeches he ran to a window to shout at the crowd outside. Fearing for their lives, MPs made a dash for the stairs, and as they tried to leave the House they were punched and kicked by the marchers. The Lords followed suit, ignominiously leaving older peers such as the eighty-year-old Lord Mansfield to fend for themselves. The Duke of Devonshire’s carriage was stopped by the mob until he agreed to shout “No Popery.” By nightfall the protest had turned into a riot. Thieves and looters joined in as bands of club-wielding rioters burned down foreign chapels and attacked the shops and houses of known Catholics.

  At first Georgiana did not realize the danger facing the capital. Her friend Miss Lloyd, she joked, was dreaming about enraged Protestants hammering on her door.

  Lord George Gordon’s people continued to make a great fracas, there is a violent mob in Moorfields, and I have learnt that five hundred guards are gone down there. I could not go to the Birthday—my gown was beautiful, a pale blue, with the drapery etc., of an embroider’d gauze in paillons. I am a little comforted for not going by the two messages I have received from Lady Melbourne and the Duke from the Prince of Wales to express his disappointment at having missed dancing with me fo
r the 3rd time.57

  But by the next day, June 6, the mob was on the point of taking over the city. Ministers and opposition alike hurriedly sent their wives and children out of town and prepared to mount a defence of the streets. But the magistrates were nowhere to be seen and, following a misunderstanding over which authority had the power to mandate the use of firearms against civilians, there were no troops in place. The rioting continued unchecked. The mob sacked Newgate Prison and burned down the King’s Bench. They exploded the distilleries at Holborn so that the streets were flooded with spirits and the water supply to Lincoln’s Inn Fields became alcoholic. Lord John Cavendish condemned the Lord Mayor’s cowardice in standing by while London burned to the ground. He had good reason; the mob targeted the houses of prominent Whigs because of the party’s support for religious toleration. Edmund Burke’s house was surrounded, but he managed to fend them off. Sir George Savile was less fortunate and narrowly escaped being burnt to death. Poor Lord Mansfield watched as rioters looted his house and destroyed his celebrated library. The Whig grandees mounted a round-the-clock defence of their houses. Georgiana wrote on June 7, forgetting her birthday in the midst of the chaos:

  I shall go to Chiswick tomorrow, for tho’ there could be no kind of danger for me, yet a woman is only troublesome. I hope and think that it will be over tonight as the Council has issued orders that the soldiers may fire. . . . the mob is a strange set, and some of it composed of mere boys. I was very much frightened yesterday, but I keep quiet and preach quiet to everybody. The night before last the Duke was in garrison at Ld Rockingham’s till five, which alarmed me not a little, but now Ld R’s is the safest place, as he has plenty of guards, a justice of peace, a hundred tradesmen arm’d, besides servants and friends.58

  Burke persuaded those MPs who had braved the streets to reach Parliament not to revoke religious tolerance legislation, even though some sought only to placate the mob. At last, on June 8, the army arrived and, aided by volunteers that included MPs, barristers, coalheavers, and Irish chairmen, organized a well-armed defence. The mob attempted to seize the Bank of England, but its defenders, ably led by Captain Holroyd, beat them off. Devonshire House was well guarded and the expected attack never came. By the ninth only pockets of resistance remained. Lord George Gordon gave himself up and was imprisoned in the Tower. Georgiana was badly shaken. “I feel mad with spirits at [it] all being over,” she wrote; “it seems now like a dream.”59 She had stayed on the balcony for four nights, staring at the orange sky as Piccadilly reverberated to the sound of gunfire and explosions. The number of people killed or seriously wounded stood at 458; whole blocks of the city lay in ruins.

  The immediate aftermath saw the total discrediting of the reformers and all the Association movements. The Whigs were blamed for irresponsibly fomenting discontent “Without Doors”—the term for the world outside Parliament. Lord North seized the political advantage and called a snap general election on September 1. Georgiana’s assistance was demanded from many quarters: in addition to the canvassing she had to do for the Cavendishes in Derby, the Duke’s family pressured her to persuade Lord Spencer to align his interests with theirs. “Lord Richard is very anxious for my father to give his interest in Cambridgeshire to Lord Robert Manners, the Duke of Rutland’s brother,” she told Lady Spencer. “I told him I dare say my father would, and they are very anxious as it is of great consequence to have Mr Parker wrote to directly, that he may speak to the tenants as otherwise they might be got by other people.”60 Her brother’s former tutor Sir William Jones, who was contesting the seat for Oxford University, also asked her to write letters on his behalf.

  Sheridan wanted to become a politician, but his lack of wealth and family connections made it impossible for him to contest a seat on his own cognizance. His vanity prevented him from making a direct application to the grandees. It suited him far better to approach his target by a more circuitous route, and for this reason he pressed Georgiana to help him. Although she thought it was a shame for him to throw away his literary career, she arranged for him to stand in the Spencer-dominated borough of Stafford. He was duly elected and wrote her a grovelling letter of thanks: “I profited by the Permission allow’d to me to make use of your Grace’s letter as my first and best introduction to Lord Spencer’s Interest in the Town. . . . It is no flattery to say that the Duchess of Devonshire’s name commands an implicit admiration wherever it is mentioned.”61 A week later, on September 25, Charles Fox invited Georgiana to accompany him on the hustings when he contested the borough of Westminster. The press was shocked by her boldness, even though she stood on the platform for only a few minutes. Fox was magnificent on the hustings, whipping up his supporters with speeches about parliamentary reform, the rights of the British people, and the consequences of royal tyranny. It was on this campaign that he earned his title “Man of the People.”

  Fox won with a comfortable majority, and his success was unexpectedly duplicated around the country. Despite its recent setbacks, the party had managed to run a well-organized election, clawing back the ground it had lost following the Gordon Riots. North’s majority was much reduced; on paper it was only 28, and he would have to rely on the independent MPs to give their support. The Whigs’ success was all the more remarkable because they had funded their campaign out of their own pockets while North had almost unlimited funds from the treasury. The near-parity of numbers convinced them that it would be only a matter of time before the government collapsed.

  CHAPTER 5

  INTRODUCTION TO POLITICS

  1780–1782

  The concourse of Nobility, etc., at the Duchess of Devonshire’s on Thursday night were so great, that it was eight o’clock yesterday morning before they all took leave. Upwards of 500 sat down to supper, and near 1000 came agreeable to invitation; and so numerous were the servants, that no less than 3500 tickets were delivered out, which entitled each of them to a pot of porter. The company consisted of the most fashionable “characters.” With respect to the ladies, the dresses were for the prevailing part, white. . . . The best dressed ladies were her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cumberland, her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Duncannon, Lady Althorpe, Lady Waldegrave, and Lady Harrington. . . . The gentlemen best dressed were his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the Marquis of Graham, and the Hon. Charles Fox.

  London Chronicle, March 21–23, 1782

  We hear the amiable Duchess of Devonshire is about to propose and promote a subscription among her female friends for building a fifty gun ship, in imitation of the Ladies in France who set the laudable example at the beginning of the war.

  Morning Post, September 21, 1782

  Lord North clung to office despite the government’s poor showing in the election. Exasperated, the Whigs consoled themselves by fêting the Prince of Wales, who amused them by being rude about his father. He took great delight in annoying his parents; at the ball to mark his official presentation to society on January 18, 1781, he snubbed the ladies of the court by dancing all night with Georgiana. The Morning Herald could not help remarking, “The Court beauties looked with an eye of envy on her Grace of Devonshire, as the only woman honoured with the hand of the heir apparent, during Thursday night’s ball at St James’s.”1

  Much against her inclination, Georgiana left London just as the new Parliament was getting under way. In February she accompanied the Duke to Hardwick, in the words of a friend, “pour faire un enfant.”*2 Lady Clermont had paid the Devonshires a visit while little Charlotte was still new to the household and was pleasantly surprised. “I never saw anything so charming as [Georgiana] has been,” she wrote to Lady Spencer, “her fondness for the Duke, and his not being ashamed of expressing his for her.”3 But relations between them had deteriorated rapidly after Harriet’s marriage to Lord Duncannon in November. To Georgiana’s embarrassment, her sister delighted the Cavendishes by becoming pregnant at once. Despite Harriet’s initial reservations her marriage appeared to be free of the tensions wh
ich plagued Georgiana’s. In February 1781 Lady Spencer wrote to inform Georgiana that Harriet’s “closet is becoming a vrai bijou, and she and her husband pass many comfortable hours in it. I trust indeed that all will go very well in that quarter.”4

  Harriet’s good fortune contributed to Georgiana’s fear that her own failure to produce a baby was a punishment from God.5 “I will not hear you give way to disappointment so much,” chided Lady Spencer. “If you were of my age there would be some reason why you should suppose you would never have children, but as it is there is no reason why you should give it up.”6 Sitting alone in cheerless Hardwick every day while the Duke went out hunting, Georgiana saw every reason why she should. The empty, silent afternoons were too much for her to bear and she blotted out her days with large doses of opiates. “I took something today,” she wrote, “but I shall ride tomorrow.”7

  The Duke was disgusted when Georgiana still showed no sign of pregnancy after a month at Hardwick. Deciding that their stay was a waste of time, he gave orders for Devonshire House to be prepared for their imminent arrival. After their return Georgiana rarely appeared in public. The papers remarked that she had “become the gravest creature in the world” and complained about her absence from society.8 On March 24 she appeared briefly at the King’s Theatre to support the dancer Vestris, an Italian immigrant and one of the most famous dancers of the time. He was performing a new dance which he and Georgiana had invented together during a private lesson at Devonshire House. Nine hundred people filled the theatre. “We were in the greatest impatience for the Duchess of Devonshire’s arrival,” reported the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, “and our eager eyes were roaming about in search of her. We spied her Grace at last sitting in her box . . . alas! We soon found out, that her Grace was only there to pay a kind of public visit to the Vestris, for the Devonshire minuet, which was received with very warm applause, and was no sooner over than the Duchess disappeared.”9