Within less than six months of her prediction Lady Jersey was the most reviled woman in England, while Caroline was loudly applauded whenever she appeared in public. The Prince’s attempt to obtain a formal separation from his wife had brought universal condemnation of Lady Jersey. This was most eloquently expressed at a ball given by the Duchess of Gordon. Lady Jersey arrived, proud as usual, but was checked by the cold reception she received on entering the ballroom. No one went up to her, and whenever she approached a group of people the conversation ceased and they immediately dispersed. The lower classes showed their disapproval in a more trenchant style: a mob stoned her house, and when she visited Brighton in the summer the locals performed a skimmington* which drove her away in shame.
Lady Jersey’s downfall coincided with Georgiana’s brief reappearance in public. In June 1796 Fox was re-elected for Westminster and his supporters carried him to Devonshire House. It was the last time the Whigs enjoyed anything that resembled a celebration. The Duke was not present to congratulate Fox on his victory, fearing that it would imply that he supported Fox’s advocacy of peace. Instead, at the last minute he asked Georgiana to organize the reception herself. She did as requested but felt wretched throughout, haunted by the memory of happier occasions, and embarrassed lest the Lady Mary Cokes of the world should accuse her of putting herself forward without the Duke’s consent. She managed the event with considerable style in spite of her reservations. Later she felt ashamed at having enjoyed herself so much and wrote a somewhat incoherent letter to George, insisting that she had not broken her promise to remain out of politics.
I certainly should not have refused myself to an act of friendship to Mr Fox, [but] I certainly feel that I ought to avoid taking any part that was separate and not under the particular guidance of the Duke of Devonshire. . . . for tho’ you forgive me I know if some of my opinions are not the same as yours (well knowing how ardently my wishes tend to your success and wishes), yet I could not bear that you should think I had been coming forward in a manner very unbecoming any woman—I therefore repeat it Dr Br. this was arrang’d without my knowledge. The little alone that took place was very disagreeable but had not any bad consequence.46
The victory celebration was the last time anyone saw Georgiana for over a year.
CHAPTER 18
INTERLUDE
1796
Dear Georgiana,” Lady Spencer had written on January 2, 1796, “your headaches so often proceed from Vexation, and your saying you are low about yourself dwells sadly upon my mind.”1 For the past few years Georgiana had often complained about an ache in her eyes during and immediately after one of her migraines. In July she went to bed with a headache, but the pain did not abate, and after a few days her right eyeball had swelled to the size of an apricot.2 Dr. Warren examined her and summoned three of the best eye surgeons in the country, including John Gunning, who was Senior Surgeon-Extraordinary to the King. The children were dispatched to Chiswick so that they would not hear their mother’s screams. Harriet and Lady Spencer joined Bess’s vigil by Georgiana’s bedside, her troubles once again uniting them.
Georgiana’s illness and the experiments performed on her in the name of medicine were appalling even by eighteenth-century standards. There was no anaesthetic except laudanum, no appreciation of cleanliness or even a basic understanding of the origins of infections. One of the doctors almost strangled her when he tried to force the blood up to her head in the belief that the eye needed to be “flushed” through. Harriet told her lover, “After hearing what I did tonight I can bear anything.”3 On August 4 Lady Spencer forced herself to describe Georgiana’s appearance to Selina Trimmer.
The inflammation has been so great that the eye, the eyelids and the adjacent parts were swelled to the size of your hand doubled, and projecting forward from the face. Every attempt was made to lower this inflammation so as to prevent any ulceration, but this has been in vain. A small ulcer has formed on the top of the cornea and has burst, and as far as that reaches the injury is not to be recovered. If the inflammation should increase, the ulcer form again, and again burst, it would destroy the whole substance of the eye, which would then sink. . . . The eyelids are still much swelled and scarred with the leeches, and the little opening between them is always filled with a thick white matter. The eye itself, to those who see it (for I cannot) is still more horrible.4
They darkened her room after the operations so that she would not know how badly her sight had been damaged. The Cavendishes came to see her and tried not to pull faces at the ugly lump protruding from her eye. Georgiana’s sister-in-law Lady George enraged Harriet by her customary insensitivity: she “is jabbering to my Sister, and putting me in a fever by saying things to her which I see make her nervous, and by peeping under her green shade to try to see her eye, which is of all things what my Sister dreads the most. She is talking to her now of the breaking of her eye, which she has never yet been told of, and now is wondering that the other eye is not affected, and fears it will. I must stop her.”5 Bess tried to explain Georgiana’s illness to the children in a way that would not frighten but would prepare them;
their mother was “in a very low and nervous state from the long pain and the quantity of opium which she has taken,” she wrote. “The complaint I believe was entirely owing to sudden cold, caught by her opening her windows as she got up late one day in a perspiration from her last headache, the eye was bad the next day, and has certainly been in some danger but is now nearly its proper size again and the inflam’d look very much diminished indeed.”6
News of the calamity at Devonshire House spread very quickly. Most newspapers reported her illness but with little of the speculation which would have accompanied such news in previous years. Now that Georgiana was no longer the object of envy, people could sympathize sincerely. The Spencer sisters were viewed as tragic and even, in some circles, as noble examples of sibling devotion; pundits remembered how Georgiana had cared for Harriet during her long illness. Such behaviour in an ordinary family would hardly have been commented on, but the members of the ton seemed so inhuman at times, so devoid of normal feelings, that the sisters appeared all the more remarkable. Their friends worried what effect Georgiana’s illness would have on Harriet’s fragile health. She was known to be badly affected. “Her care of herself is so little, and her attachment to her sister is so great,” wrote Lord Morpeth to Granville Leveson Gower, who was fretting that she would have another relapse.
Fortunately, Georgiana’s health, although not her sight, began to recover quickly. Four weeks after the attack any light or motion still brought on spasms of pain. The right eye could only detect shapes, and the left had also suffered some damage during the treatment and as a consequence her sight was slightly blurred. Yet she remained so hopeful of a full recovery that when Dr. Warren announced that the shades around the lights at Devonshire House could be removed since there was nothing more he could do, they remained in place so that Georgiana would think that she was still under treatment. “There is little hope of her eye recovering properly, she however is always in hopes and tis best it should be so,” wrote a friend sadly.7 The other unmentionable subject was her looks. Georgiana could not see herself properly for the first two months, and that too was a blessing. The children were brought to her in September and warned specifically not to stare or show any fear at her face. She was pathetically glad when they came, and their unrestrained tears enabled her to cry with them without shame.
Lady Spencer was proud of Georgiana’s courage. Not once had she indulged in hysterics or acted the part of a spoilt invalid. Her harsh experiences during Eliza’s birth had taught her a greater fortitude than either she or anyone else had imagined. It supported her now during the worst moments of her life and afterwards, for the infection did not disappear for several months and each time the doctors returned they subjected her to hours of torture.
When Georgiana finally emerged from her sickroom, everyone immediately noticed the changes to
her personality: there was no laughter or lightness in her, she had also lost too much weight and looked much older than her thirty-nine years. The bottom half of her face was unscarred but her right eye now drooped. She tried to show interest in those around her, but the illness had made her introverted. She would pick up on innocuous comments and dwell on them for hours afterwards in a way which alarmed her mother. There was no reason why Georgiana could not leave the house, make little visits and receive callers, but she was too shy. Her friends gently tried to help her retrieve some semblance of her old routine, but without success. Lady Melbourne invited Georgiana to spend a few weeks at Brocket Hall in comfort and seclusion. At the last minute she decided not to go. She explained to Little Georgiana that it was partly due to her eye aching but also “I had another reason, I saw Mr Beauclerk who returned from thence today and told me that Ly E. Bentinck and many ladys were expected so that my courage was not sufficient for the enterprise.”8 This was exactly, Lady Spencer told Selina, what she feared would happen:
All my consolation, from the very moment I had got over the shock of seeing her poor eye, has been the benefit I have hoped she may derive from it, and for some weeks her sentiments seemed so exactly what I wished that my confidence was very great that this would be one of the happiest epochs of her life, but before I left Chiswick I feared that the fatal enemy to her peace—the world—was gaining ground imperceptibly and that a barren mortification was all she would reap. . . . 9
While Georgiana retreated into darkness, Bess was enjoying an excess of good fortune. Mr. Foster died unexpectedly in November, so her sons Augustus and Frederick could at last come over from Ireland; her widow’s jointure would make her financially independent and, most important of all, she was now free to marry again. As if on cue, the Duchess of Richmond died. Although she had never reproached her husband for resuming his affair with Bess two years ago, she had nevertheless remained an obstacle. “The Dss of Richmond has at last slipt off merely out of attention to Ly E.F.,” Lady Sutherland commented sarcastically. “It is odd that Mr Foster and she should have calculated so nearly.”10
Georgiana generously invited the Foster boys to stay, adding that although she was “half-blind” she was still anxious to meet them. “I do not know if you remember me, but I assure you that I never have forgot you since Bath,” she wrote in a shaky hand.11 They arrived on December 17, the four resident children safely out of the way so that the reunited family could have its first moments in privacy. “Bess is ill with happiness,” Georgiana told her mother. “I never saw a more touching sight. They clung to poor Bess, who cried terribly. Mr Foster [Frederick] is plain but a very interesting and sensible young man. Augustus a very fine boy of 16.”12 Little Georgiana and Harryo, thirteen and eleven respectively, did not share their mother’s satisfaction and rather resented the intrusion of two shy and gauche Irishmen in their midst. No one would explain why the Fosters did not have their own home.
No doubt Georgiana’s motives in offering to provide the Fosters with a home were prompted by genuine feeling. But the action also contained a message to Bess, a plea that she should not reject her surrogate, Cavendish, family. The possibility that Bess and the Duke of Richmond would be conveniently widowed at the same time had never occurred to Georgiana. Until this untoward event Bess’s relationship with the Duke of Richmond had posed no threat to the stability of the ménage à trois. It is impossible to know whether the Duke of Devonshire minded about the Duke of Richmond. His thoughts do not survive and one can only surmise that his dislike of change would make him hostile to the idea of Bess marrying. Georgiana could not accept such a possibility: she wrote Bess a letter, in the form of a poem, which asked her to stay:
I regret not the freedom of will,
Or sigh, as uncertain I tread;
I am freer and happier still,
When by thee I am carefully led.
Ere my Sight I was doomed to resign,
My heart I surrendered to thee;
Not a thought or an Action was mine,
But I saw as thou badst me to see.
Thy watchful affection I wait,
And hang with Delight on Thy voice;
And Dependance is softened by fate,
Since Dependance on Thee is my choice.13
Bess promised to do nothing in the short term. She was not sacrificing anything by agreeing to Georgiana’s request; the lovers fully intended to observe twelve months’ mourning for their respective spouses to avoid accusations of over-haste. Georgiana was reassured, although if she had seen Bess’s behaviour at Bath in April 1797 it would have been all too clear that her friend was determined to make a new life for herself. As one of the ladies at Bath observed, “Lady Eliz. Foster is here all in a tender wee waw high ho! sort of mood with coquettish weeds and demi caractère grief, agreeable and pleasant enough I think when she forgets to Devonsherise her mouth.”14 Bess was happy in the certainty that when she became the Duchess of Richmond she would at last have the life she craved. Her jealousy of Georgiana’s wealth and influence need never trouble her again; indeed she would atone for it by being generous towards her friend: inviting Georgiana to political soirées, bringing Georgiana to the opera as her companion—in short, in the nicest possible way achieving her secret wish to outrival her dearest and best friend.
CHAPTER 19
ISOLATION
1796–1799
The daughter of the Duchess of Devonshire, a sweet bud of loveliness, is to be introduced to the circle of fashion in the course of next winter. Devonshire House has of late undergone considerable improvements, and will, ere long, be ready for the reception of its noble owners.
Morning Herald, June 28, 1799
My sister continues mending,” Harriet wrote in December 1796 to her lover, Leveson Gower. “But it was thought necessary to perform a most painful operation on her, applying causticks behind her ears and a blister to the back of her neck for four hours. I never saw anything like the agony she suffer’d, & the exertion I made to hold & soothe her brought my old complaint of spasms with great violence.”1 Georgiana’s recovery was hindered by the exceptional cold of the winter. The whole country was suffering: animals froze to death on the hills, people went hungry (although they weren’t starving like the peasants in France), and the mortality rate among the young and the old rose sharply. The Duke’s uncle, Lord John Cavendish, succumbed at the age of sixty-four, dying just two weeks after Georgiana’s operation. “Your papa was very much affected,” she told Little G.2 Lord John had been a surrogate father and mentor to him. He was also the last Cavendish to have held office during the Duke’s lifetime.
The thought that he had failed his uncle by not becoming a statesman in the Cavendish mould may have been uppermost in the Duke’s mind when he returned from Lord John’s funeral. He arrived at Chatsworth in an emotional state and went immediately to Georgiana, who comforted him while he cried. She had seen him cry only three times before: once when his brother Richard died in 1781, and twice thirteen years later, in 1794, over the successive deaths of his sister Dorothy and uncle Lord George. Georgiana could sense that on this occasion the Duke was upset by more than just the loss of Lord John. The past few months had been deeply unsettling for him. At one point he had feared that he would lose his wife to illness and his mistress to a rival. He was shaken by the experience and yearned for a more stable life. Now that Georgiana was thought to be out of danger he wanted them to live as husband and wife. On February 3, 1797, less than six weeks after Lord John’s death, Georgiana informed her mother that she had received a visit from Dr. Croft. “It has been Croft’s opinion lately that I miscarry’d,” she wrote. “I was not much past therefore tis not possible to judge but it appear’d so.”3
Bess was in Bath when Georgiana suffered her miscarriage. She was there ostensibly to visit her younger sister Louisa, although people looked out for the Duke of Richmond’s carriage outside their door. Bess’s stay was somewhat marred by the rumour that the city was
about to be invaded by French troops. “Louisa and I feel as if we were going to be carried off,” she told Georgiana.4 She was referring to the invasion force which had landed in February at Fishguard in Wales. In fact it consisted of only 2,000 men who were easily captured, but it was the French government’s second attempt. A few months earlier 15,000 troops had sailed to Bantry Bay in south-west Ireland, where poor weather had prevented them from landing.
The thought that luck was all that stood between Paris and London was no comfort to the British. William Pitt and his inner war cabinet tried to maintain the appearance of calm although in private they were frantic. Spain had switched sides in 1796 and joined France, leaving Britain without a single ally. Napoleon Bonaparte was now Commander-in-Chief and had led the French army to victory against Austria. Georgiana’s brother dreaded to think how they would defend the country if Napoleon led his armies to England. His fear was considerably heightened when in May two of the navy’s largest fleets at Spithead and Nore briefly mutinied within weeks of each other over poor pay and conditions. Understandably, George was described by those who saw him during this time as “very nervous.” Georgiana explained to Little G that “your dear Uncle Spencer’s honour and happyness is at stake—any bad success would fall (tho’ undeserving) on him.”*5
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