The illness occurred just before Harriet and Georgiana were exposed on the Stock Exchange. Nathaniel Wraxall hinted at dark happenings in his memoirs: “Some years later, Sheridan joined in a partnership with two ladies of the highest distinction, but whom I will not name, for the purpose of making purchases and sales, vulgarly called dabbling, in the public funds. The speculation proved most unfortunate, as they waddled, and became lame ducks. Nor was the bankruptcy of the firm the only evil that followed this experiment; but the subject is too delicate. . . .”19 The rumours about Georgiana and Harriet reached Coutts in France; he immediately demanded an explanation from Georgiana, but she denied that her name had been posted up:
whatever I have been foolish enough to lose has always been paid directly nor do I hear of any deficiency of any kind—What can have occasioned the report I know not. . . . The truth is my affairs are as you left, which is bad enough, but no worse than you know. There has been no discovery—my disclosure to the Duke was voluntary and lucky it was for me that I made it. I am convinced in my own mind that all will be paid; but the uncertainty of my situation is dreadful.
She also denied the reports about Harriet, saying, “her illness was a miscarriage succeeded by inflammation in the womb and bowels. For 10 days she was in the greatest danger but is thank God restored to me.”20 While she lay paralysed Harriet caught bronchial pneumonia and her coughing damaged her lungs. The family resigned itself to her imminent death.
After several months of silent pique, the Duke behaved with surprising generosity towards Georgiana and Harriet. Ignoring his family’s injunction to abandon his wife and her relatives, he rented a house in Bath large enough to accommodate his and Harriet’s children, and moved both families down there. No record survives explaining his precise reasons for taking charge of Harriet and protecting Georgiana. It is clear, however, that he was not only attached to his sister-in-law but had become more sympathetic to Georgiana. He was not in love with her, but after fifteen years of marriage there were indissoluble ties between them. The Duke may have felt a debt of gratitude for her acquiescence regarding Bess and Caroline St. Jules. Despite all that had passed between them, in supporting Georgiana now the Duke was trying to show he was pleased with his son and that he forgave her for lying to him. There was no reason, he thought, why they could not always live this way.
The Morning Post approved of the Duke’s loyalty, reporting: “The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire are at Bath, giving the best examples of fashion, in alleviating the lingering illness of their sister, Lady Duncannon.”21 Harriet remained at Bath for several months, attended by Dr. Warren and nursed by Lady Spencer, Georgiana, and Bess. “My dear sister had a return of dreadful spasms last night,” Georgiana told Coutts in July 1791, “they have left her very weak, and tho’ we trace some symptoms of returning sensation these painful attacks are dreadful.”22 Dr. Warren prescribed a warmer climate as the best remedy for Harriet’s health. Lisbon seemed an ideal option as the climate was warm and dry and the country was free from political turmoil. The only impediment to the plan was Harriet, who declared she would rather die than go abroad with just her husband for company.
Nothing had been decided when the novelist Fanny Burney paid her first and only call on Georgiana in August. She was staying with her friend Mrs. Ord while she became accustomed to her retirement from court as Second Keeper of the Queen’s Robes. The change to a civilian routine proved to be more of a shock than she had anticipated, and she gratefully accepted her friend’s invitation to stay with her at Bath while she became acclimatized to once more being sole mistress of her time. For the past five years she had lived at the beck and call of the Queen and the six princesses from seven in the morning until twelve at night. They adored and trusted her, but nevertheless Fanny was exhausted from her emotionally demanding as well as burdensome position. Naturally she shared her employers’ dislike of the Whigs and readily believed the rumours which circulated about them at court. She was appalled when Mrs. Ord’s friendship with Lady Spencer brought her into contact with women of such tarnished character. Her record of her meeting with Georgiana, Harriet, and Bess is a unique description of their domestic situation by someone unconnected with the Devonshire House Circle.
Fanny had been introduced to Lady Spencer at a party once before in 1783, but had scarcely spoken to her. With the leisure of a full afternoon to study her properly she decided that for all her pious airs her chief occupation seemed to be a tedious form of self-promotion. Burney was just beginning to dismiss Lady Spencer as a prig and a bore when she began talking about Harriet: “she spoke of Lady Duncannon’s situation with much sorrow, and expatiated upon her resignation to her fate, her prepared state for Death and the excellence of her principles, with an eagerness and feeling that quite overwhelmed me with surprise and embarrassment.” Fanny was shocked by Lady Spencer’s reference to Harriet’s principles; she knew what everyone in London knew—that Harriet had never been faithful to Duncannon, that she had had an affair with Sheridan, and that Duncannon was delaying a divorce until his father died “lest the grief of such an event should shorten his days.” She had even heard the rumour that Harriet had tried to poison herself. Yet Lady Spencer talked with such conviction that Fanny found herself wondering, “Can it be that she is, after all, innocent? Or is her mother deluded?”23
The following day she had the opportunity to decide for herself. Her visit to Lady Spencer was interrupted halfway through by Harriet’s servants, who opened the door and carried in the invalid. “I felt an unconquerable repugnance to even be in a room with her,” Fanny recorded, and she turned a hard and unwelcoming face to the figure lying on the sofa. Harriet invited Fanny to sit next to her in a soft voice barely stronger than a whisper which pricked her conscience a little but not enough to make her accept the invitation. Burney wanted to despise her, but as the afternoon wore on her opinion changed in spite of herself:
I perceived her Dress was extremely becoming, though simple, and in part, that of an invalide: in part, I say, for to a close cap she added a hat and feather. . . . But in point of beauty, she never looked in my eyes, to so much advantage. Sickness has softened her features and her Expression into something so interesting and so unusually lovely, that I should by no means have known her for the same lady I had so little admired in her early Days. The tone of her voice, too, modified by the same cause, is soft, sweet, and penetrating. She never spoke, without catching all my attention, however unwillingly, and her words and her manner enforced its power by expressing constantly something cheerful about her own wretched state, or grateful for the services offered or done her.
Duncannon then walked in and put on one of his displays of affection that could so completely fool outsiders: “Judge then, my Fresh surprise, to see him hasten up to his Wife, enquire tenderly how she did and take the seat I had declined! . . . He would let no one but himself lift her into [the wheel chair] and was so silent, quiet, and still in all he did for her, that I plainly saw his assistance was the result of affection, not ostentation.”24
While Fanny Burney was debating whether Harriet could really be guilty of the crimes circulated against her, more family members arrived. Selina brought in the little girls, who were in high spirits because it was Harryo’s birthday. Fanny disliked Selina’s self-satisfied demeanour:
[she] is a pleasing, but not pretty young woman, and who, though she seems born with her excellent mother’s amiableness and serenity of mind, appears to me rather too much fascinated with the charms of her altered situation. She is not absolutely affected, but she is not natural, the manner in which she deviates from simplicity is strongly imitative of those patterns in high life which are forever before her eyes. She seems, in short, not merely to enjoy being made one of them, but studiously to mark she considers herself wholly in that point of view. She was not well and Ly Spencer was extremely tender to her.25
The “little French lady,” as she described five-year-old Caroline St. Jules, also displease
d her. Caroline seemed a different creature compared to the “happy disposition” of the Cavendish girls; she was “fat and full of mincing little affectations and airs.” No doubt she had learned them from her mother, Fanny thought, who had heard rumours about her too: “To the tales told about her, scandal is nothing—INFAMY enwraps them.” The appearance of George Spencer, whose grave manner and honest face scored high marks with her, calmed Burney’s inflamed feelings for a short while until Georgiana and Bess flurried in. Lady Spencer made no attempt to hide her dislike of Bess; she introduced Georgiana to Fanny with an air of pride and satisfaction and “then, slightly, as if unavoidably, said ‘Lady Elizabeth Foster.’ ”
By this time Fanny’s curiosity was stronger than her moral outrage, and she was eager to learn more about this infamous coterie. But Bess seized her, “to my great provocation,” and monopolized her entirely while Georgiana went to talk to Harriet. She carried on making bright conversation, although Fanny could tell that “her general powers of shining were violently dampened by my coldness and reserve.” Caroline ran up to Bess quite frequently, yet “I observed that not one other amongst the Children ever approached her, neither did she once call upon them.” Georgiana, on the other hand, moved about the room leading the children in all sorts of games “like the Pied Piper.” The knowledge that Bess was flaunting her illegitimate child in front of them made the respectable Fanny feel ill: “something so rose in my throat during this little scene, that I had real difficulty . . . to answer her.” Their conversation convinced her that “Lady Elizabeth has the general character of inheriting all the wit, all the subtlety, all les agréments [charm], and all the wickedness of the Herveys.”
This judgement of Bess coloured Fanny’s view of Georgiana, whom she regarded as the victim of her friend’s designs. “I did not find so much beauty in her as I expected, not withstanding the variations of accounts; but I found far more of manner, politeness and gentle quiet.” When she finally managed to escape from Bess and talk to Georgiana she thought she was one of the most pleasing women she had ever met: well read, interested in others and interesting to talk to. Fanny recorded, “it is impossible to view. . . this celebrated woman without feeling the strongest disposition to admire and like her.” Consequently:
I fancied all sort of things about Lady Eliz Foster—I fancied that while—from some inevitable compact with the Duke,—she [Georgiana] consented to countenance her, and receive her as her own guest, she was secretly hurt, offended and unhappy. . . . She submitted with the best grace in her power to save her own character by affecting to have no doubt of Lady Elizabeth’s, but that, in her inmost mind, she detested such a Companion, and felt a hopeless and helpless resentment of her own situation. . . . It is generally believed her own terrible extravagancies have extorted from her a consent to this unnatural inmating of her House, from the threats of the Duke that they should be separated! What a payement for her indiscretion. . . . All this I thought, I imagined I read it from time to time in her own countenance,—and I found myself strongly concerned for her in the situation.
Her judgement seemed confirmed beyond doubt when she bumped into Georgiana and Lady Spencer walking in town without Bess a few days later. She seemed “more easy and lively in her spirits, and consequently more lovely in her person. . . . It struck me, also, in her favour, that her spirits had before been depressed by the presence of the odious Lady Elizabeth and were now revived by being absent from her. Certainly at all events she was quite a different woman, gay, easy and charming. Indeed that last epithet might have been coined for her.”
“This has been a singular acquaintance for me!” wrote Burney when she left Bath, “that the first visit I should make, after leaving the Queen, should be to meet the head of opposition public, the Duchess of Devonshire! . . .I came away impressed with the most mixt sensations of pain and pleasure. The terrible stories circulated of the miserable conduct of a pair of this community made me shudder at their powers of pleasing.”26 Yet she resolved to like all of them except Bess, whom she thought irredeemably awful. She also detected that something was troubling Georgiana. “She seems by Nature to possess the highest animal spirits, but she appeared to me not happy. I thought she looked oppressed within—though there is a native cheerfulness about her which I fancy scarce ever deserts her.”27 She could not have known the real cause: Georgiana was carrying Charles Grey’s baby.
Harriet and Bess had known ever since Georgiana discovered it herself. “There has never existed a stricter confidence and friendship than there has [been] for many years between my sister, Lady Elizabeth and myself,” Harriet once said of their relationship. “But to avoid tracasseries we long ago made it a rule never to conceal anything great or small from each other that concerned ourselves, and never to impart anything that concern’d our respective friends unless by their desire or consent.”28 They had repeatedly warned Georgiana to be careful, but she was infatuated with Grey. He followed her to Bath while the Duke was away, and was often seen going in and out of the house. “She distracts me,” Bess complained to Lady Melbourne, who had also admonished Georgiana, “by working herself up to think she is more attach’d to him than I know she can be.”29
Georgiana was mesmerized by him. They made no attempt to be discreet, and the public way in which Grey would monopolize her at a party or argue with her if he felt neglected dismayed even the most tolerant members of the Circle. Nobody wanted her to become another Lady Derby. Sheridan took it upon himself to make her see sense: “There is one subject too I do most vehemently want to talk to you about—tho’ I am afraid—but don’t you be afraid for it relates only to yourself and interests me only because it is so dangerous to you.”30 But she wouldn’t listen. Their lack of caution made Bess dread the arrival of the papers each day, expecting to read some item about them in the press. However, help came from an unexpected, although unpleasant source. Lady Spencer, Bess told Lady Melbourne, “had received an anonymous letter and her commands are you know absolute and her vigilance extreme. . . . [compared to Lady Spencer] your letters and my entreaties would have been a drop in the ocean.” Condemning her daughter and blaming Bess and Harriet as her collaborators, Lady Spencer browbeat Georgiana until she swore to send Grey back to London. She was not even allowed to say goodbye to him. “From Friday to this morning that he has gone away we have lived in fear and misery,” Bess continued in her report to Lady Melbourne. “But I have the happiness of telling you that she gave him no secret meeting, and there was no taking leave which I dreaded. . . . at least she had not entangled herself further, and his present absence must set all things right.”31
Lady Spencer wrote to George of her satisfaction, convinced that she had been successful. George’s reply was cautious: “Upon the subject of the Dss, I am glad to hear what you say, and can only add upon a subject like that it is right to hope the best, whatever we may expect or fear.”32 He was right not to share his mother’s confidence—Georgiana was already pregnant when Lady Spencer arrived. After carrying three children she could detect the changes in her body immediately. As usual she had to confess to someone, and she chose to send Coutts one of her unprovoked denials. On July 17, while writing about Harriet’s health, she added without warning: “I assure you I am not likely to give Hartington either a brother or a sister, which I am very glad of, as I should be very sorry to have any impediment to my attendance on my Dearest sister. I order’d half a buck for you. I hope it will be good.”33 Coutts, of course, had no idea of the letter’s significance.
They managed to keep Georgiana’s secret safe for as long as the pregnancy did not show. However, by October she was into her sixth month and large. Harriet’s health was improving, but she still needed to convalesce in a warmer climate and this seemed Georgiana’s only hope of escape. Dr. Warren had agreed to Harriet’s request to recommend Cornwall rather than Lisbon; it was as far as they could go without making the Duke concerned about Georgiana’s absence. But before they could put their plan into acti
on the Duke arrived on an unannounced visit: someone in London had told him he ought to see his wife immediately. He confronted Georgiana alone; the sound of shouting and crying terrified Harriet, who lay on a couch in the adjoining room. At one point he called in Bess and berated her for covering up for Georgiana. “I never felt so frightened about her as now,” wrote Harriet to Lady Melbourne. “Wherever she goes I will go with her. If it should be decided for the parting I will beg [Dr.] Warren to send me abroad—that will be a pretence for her going.”34
After the Duke left, the sisters remained in their separate rooms. Harriet could hear Georgiana moving about in hers and she sent in a note of enquiry. The reply confirmed her fears. “We must go abroad—immediately.” Harriet wrote to Lady Melbourne. “Nothing else will do, neither prayers nor entreaties will alter him. He says there is no choice between this, or public entire separation at home. . . . write to me, come if you can, give us some comfort but do not betray me.”35 Georgiana also wrote to Lady Melbourne but she was too frightened to admit the truth. Instead she touched on the possibility of Harriet’s health sending them abroad and explained the shaky writing and blotched paper with an airy “I am out of spirits my love, so don’t mind me.” Her chief concern was how Charles Grey would react if she left England: “If I go you must stem the fury of the Black Sea.”36
The morning after the interview Harriet talked to Bess and was relieved to find both her common sense and loyalty intact. “Bess has very generously promised to go with us. I urg’d her to it almost as much on her own account as my sister’s, it must have been ruin to her to stay behind.”37 With Bess’s support secured, Harriet turned her thoughts to her mother and husband: “Lord D. and my mother still both believe we are going to Penzance, and how they will ever be brought to consent I know not.”38 Lady Spencer was at Hollywell and had no idea of the scenes at Bath until Georgiana wrote to her saying that Warren had ordered Harriet abroad immediately. She hurried to her daughters, worried that Harriet had suffered a relapse. Her arrival plunged the house into crisis again. “My mother is come and our difficulties encrease,” wrote Harriet. “Vexation and unhappiness surround me. I almost wish myself at the bottom of the sea.”39
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