The Duchess

by Amanda Foreman

  Georgiana had already begun to feel sceptical about Pitt’s intention to include Fox in the new government. She had heard rumours that he was holding private meetings with his own friends. Fox wrote to Grey as soon as the rumours were confirmed: “I understood pretty distinctly from Lord G[renville] today that if P[itt] found His Majesty impracticable upon the idea of an extended administration, he (P.) should feel himself bound to try one himself. These were not the words; but nearly the substance and exactly the same idea that we heard thro’ the Duchess. . . .”19 Their fears soon proved to be justified: the King had no intention of allowing Fox into the cabinet and told Pitt it was a “personal insult” to suggest his name. Fox was magnanimous when he heard the news; at a crowded meeting at Carlton House he urged his side to work without him. Considering the extent to which the coalition owed its success to his efforts this was a ludicrous suggestion. The meeting closed with a unanimous decision to remain aloof from the new government. A meeting of the Grenvillites at Camelford House produced the same result; without Fox there could be no alliance with Pitt. This was splendid news for the Whigs. It meant that Pitt would be as isolated as Addington had been, and that his government would be vulnerable to attack. A Pittite strategist estimated that he would face 79 Foxites, 68 Addingtonians, 23 Grenvillites, 41 supporting the Prince of Wales, and 29 whose leadership was doubtful: 240 in all.20 The opposition was in no doubt that the struggle would continue.

  Georgiana performed her usual trick of arranging delightful entertainments at Chiswick to boost party morale. The sense of collective strength remained high when the season ended and London emptied for the summer. In June Gillray commented on the Whigs’ new-found solidarity in a cartoon of the coalition entitled “L’Assemblée Nationale:—or—Grand Co-operation Meeting at St. Anne’s Hill,” which showed Mr. and Mrs. Fox hosting a party. Pictured in the middle was Georgiana, holding a fan with the words THE DEVONSHIRE DELIGHT OR THE NEW COALITION REEL written across it. Although the cartoon was inimical towards the party in general, it affirmed, if there was ever a doubt, Georgiana’s pre-eminence among the Whigs.

  CHAPTER 24

  “THE MINISTRY

  OF ALL THE TALENTS”

  1804–1806

  A woman more exalted in every accomplishment of rapturous beauty, of elevated genius, and of angelic temper, has not adorned the present age. . . .

  Morning Chronicle, March 31, 1806

  As was his right, Pitt did not call Parliament into session for six months. It gave him ample time to look for means to shore up his weak government. Almost all the debating talent was on the other side, and he did not expect much from some of his new cabinet members. The opposition could do little except wait for the battle to begin.

  The Devonshires went to the seaside for their health and busied themselves with family matters. Georgiana was worried about Harryo, who was argumentative and miserable because of Duncannon. He still could not make up his mind between Harryo and Lady Elizabeth Villiers, Lady Jersey’s daughter, and was pursuing both girls. Even more galling to Georgiana and Harriet was the fact that Lady Jersey had succeeded in making the impressionable Duncannon infatuated with her; if she ordered him to marry Lady Elizabeth there was no doubt that he would. Only when Duncannon was away from her long enough for her spell to be broken did he remember his cousin. “I feel anxious about Harriet and Duncannon,” Georgiana wrote to Little G. “It must not go on—something must be decided and that is one reason why I wish her to go to you as I think you will judge better than I can.” She perfectly understood and forgave her nephew’s enthralment: “I think when Lady J pleases there is quite a fascination about her, at least I have often and often gone to her resolving to arm myself against her flattery and have found myself quite forgetting all I resolv’d and believing her as sincere as myself. Yet she is not a person one should trust—it would be the height of folly to suppose she was not as [false] to oneself as she is to all the world.”1

  Georgiana was frightened when she saw Harryo’s common sense overruled by her passions. If she suspected she was being manipulated, Harryo would do something perverse simply to prove that no one had control over her.2 Her behaviour made it difficult for Georgiana to be candid with her or talk to her as a friend when her intentions were so often misunderstood. Harryo’s adolescence was a complete contrast to that of Little G’s who had never subjected her mother to sullen silences or nurtured slow-burning resentment. Little G was pregnant with her third child in September 1804, when she wrote to Georgiana: “One cannot know till one has separated from you how different you are from everybody else, how superior to all mothers, even good ones.”3

  However, Georgiana’s persistence succeeded in wearing down some of her daughter’s defences. At the age of eighteen Harryo finally discovered the element of friendship which had been missing in her relationship with Georgiana. While she stayed with Little G at Castle Howard she wrote to thank her mother for her advice about Duncannon: “You have made my situation with regard to Duncannon just what I wished it to be.”4 She added, with a touching earnestness, that her feelings towards her had changed: “I never knew thoroughly what I felt for you till I left you.” As if to make up for the years of quiet estrangement, Harryo felt a rush of emotion for her mother: “I am sure you alone could inspire what I feel for you, it is enthusiasm and adoration, that for anybody else would be ridiculous, but that to deny it [to] you would be unnatural.”5 Georgiana’s reply has not survived but there is no doubt of her happiness at having at last connected with her second daughter.

  It seemed to her that nothing would ever atone for the years her children had spent as orphans, with only Selina for company. She had come to accept Harryo’s reserve as part of her punishment for abandoning them, but Hart’s partial deafness and isolation hurt her most. When he was eleven Georgiana had expressed her worry to the Duke, admitting that she may have been responsible for spoiling him, but also pointing out that he usually rejected her advances and seemed to prefer the company of servants.6 Harrow had helped to draw him out, but he still disliked physical contact, and sisterly teasing provoked hysterics. Bess was the only one whom he seemed to trust, which might have made Georgiana jealous had she not been relieved to see Hart talking to someone. She arranged for him to stay with Bess at the seaside while Harryo was at Castle Howard. “I am full of anxiety on this subject and the fortnight he is away shall be very anxious,” she confided to her mother. But “I have great dependence on Ly E’s care and she has influence with him about hours.”7

  With her children away, Georgiana was able to devote her energies to the crisis developing around the Prince. Since the King’s illness the power of Carlton House had increased: it was no longer merely the allegiance of a few men but a recognizable party in Parliament. After Pitt’s return to government the Prince gave a series of political banquets for the opposition which unnerved the present ministry. No one connected with Pitt doubted that as soon as the King died or lapsed into insanity the Prince would have his revenge on his father’s men. Almost immediately after taking office Pitt began negotiating with the Prince’s friends to see what would gain his support for the government. Lord Moira and George Tierney thought he should arrange a reconciliation between father and son and even suggested a basis for the talks: the Prince’s desire to hold a military rank, and the education of Princess Charlotte. The first was a hopeless pursuit—the King would never permit his son to join the army (the Prince had never even been allowed to go abroad). The second, the Princess Charlotte matter, looked promising. The King wanted the Princess to be brought up with her unmarried aunts at Windsor, while the Prince was anxious to remove her from the care of his wife, Princess Caroline. Pitt’s idea was to reconcile father and son (they had not spoken for almost a year), using Princess Charlotte as the bait; then, in the aftermath of warm feelings, to invite the Prince’s friends to join his government. Fortunately for the Whigs, Carlton House followers were divided over the wisdom of co-operating with Pitt. Sheridan
, of course, was vehemently against the idea, but Lord Moira, who had already been softened by an offer of a cabinet post, was eager for the Prince to agree.

  The interview was set for November 12, 1804, and as the day approached the Prince showed all the signs of a man set to betray his friends. There were crowded discussions at Brooks’s and Devonshire House about how best to prevent the wayward Prince from deserting the coalition. The Whigs feared that if they pressed him too hard he would run into Pitt’s arms, but they agreed to allow Georgiana to talk to him in private. In a frank letter she pointed out that “they court him in proportion as he approaches power, and that he therefore ought to be beware [of] shackling himself or being too much oblig’d to them for giving him power when they cannot perhaps much longer deprive him of it.”8 She also managed to persuade the Prince to see her and after several intensive counterpropaganda sessions at Devonshire House had persuaded him to free the reconciliation of its political implications.

  On the eleventh, however, the Prince sent a message to Georgiana begging her to see him before he went to Kew. She found him “hurried and agitated” and sensed that he was torn between his desire for power and his wish to be loyal to his friends. Someone from their side had to counteract Pitt’s promises, and she knew it would sound unconvincing coming from her. Thinking quickly, she sent for Fox, who was at Woburn. London buzzed with the news that something significant was about to happen. The Morning Herald reported: “yesterday Mr Fox arrived in town at five o’clock from Woburn. He is come alone, and said to have been sent for.”9 Thomas Grenville was at Devonshire House keeping his colleagues informed of developments. “I have in fact seen F[ox], just getting out of his chaise,” he scribbled to Georgiana’s brother. “But as the P[rince] immediately came up I retired, the P just seeing me enough to stop me and to tell me that F. should repeat to me all that passed.”10 Together, Georgiana and Fox primed the Prince on what he should say to the King and then waited anxiously for his return.

  The interview was a disaster for Pitt. Father and son attempted to be polite, but as the King spoke almost non-stop and barely listened to the Prince’s replies it was hardly a reconciliation. The Prince returned to London in a much steadier frame of mind, and Georgiana was able to inform George that “he has put a stop in fact to all proceedings, tho’ he will still have a written proposal about Princess Charlotte. He conveyed to Mr Pitt thro’ Ld Moira that he could not enter into any negotiation that did not include all his friends. Tho’ he was ready at any turn to listen to any that did.”11 Pitt was astonished and dismayed when he discovered that his plan had failed at the last moment. To make matters worse a misunderstanding had arisen over Princess Charlotte. The King wrongly assumed that the Prince had given his assent to having her brought up at Windsor. The Prince was furious when he learned of this and blamed Pitt for meddling.

  Fox was jubilant; as a result of Georgiana’s and his intervention the Prince had remained firm. He told Grey: “Opposition seems now restored (at least) to what it was before the Duke of Portland’s desertion, and the other adverse circumstances of those times.”12 He ended his letter by saying, “you will be glad to hear that the Duke of Devonshire is doing something handsome and kind about the Duchess’s debts.” The combination of her creditors’ harassment and her friends’ pleading had forced Georgiana to own up to her husband. “Be freed, dearest, I conjure you,” Bess wrote while Georgiana dithered over her decision; “it is better things should be as [bad] as they are, than you go on temporising as you have done, promising I am afraid and not able to perform and therefore exasperating people—whereas make but one effort and tell dear Ca . . .and [shed] these shackles that really render useless the finest heart and mind any being was blessed with and withholds happiness from you.”13 In another letter she tried to play on Georgiana’s guilt: “If you knew how terrible it is to me to have dear Ca say sometimes that I do not check you enough, that I know everything and ought to control you and this when I know how little I do know and how impossible to prevent things, and how much happier you would be if I could.”14 Bess’s pleas were echoed by Fox, who feared that even if she did confess to the Duke she would lie about the sum, “and then new debts, new borrowing and a new series of distress and misery.”15 Robert Adair tried to frighten her into being honest: “Count up, I repeat it. . . . you are now drawing out your last stake. . . . it is not I alone who speak to you now, it is your fame, your quiet, and your happiness, it is every friend you have living, it is our common and ever lamented friend who is no more [James Hare], who invokes you from the grave to put an end once and forever to that system which has caused you such endless anxiety and alarm.”16

  Georgiana knew her friends were right. She was exhausted and no longer had the energy to fight off her creditors. She would be mortified, she confided to the Prince, if her children ever learned the truth about her, and described the “constant anxiety and humiliation of knowing one has been to blame for want of caution and getting into bad hands, and yet feeling the impossibility of escaping, and besides the constant and incessant dread of some great alarm and fuss, and shrinking from the idea of being expos’d to the most painful conversations.”17 However, Georgiana was fortunate that Bess and Harriet were there to give support just as they had after the great confrontation thirteen years earlier. Harriet waited nervously for the moment:

  Ca knows everything except the amount. He look’d grave and agitated, but answer’d nothing. I am extremely anxious as I think it far more than mere relief, but literally a concern of life and death. She has been all this while taking courage and he in some degree suspecting and avoiding it. . . . I am sure he really will let it be put in the hands of F[arrar] and A[ltman], and not let Heaton have anything to do with it, that all may be settled, and she restor’d to health and peace and honour, which now really is sadly injured.18

  The Duke had been expecting a sum of £5,000 or £6,000, not the £50,000 Georgiana eventually presented to him. Bess stepped in immediately to act as a buffer between the two of them, but her fears proved exaggerated. The Duke did not shout or threaten a separation from Georgiana; at the moment of truth he saw not a liar or a cheat but a tragic figure in need of assistance. “There never was anything so angelic as the Duke of Devonshire’s conduct,” wrote Bess in her syrupy way to her son Augustus Foster. “The many conversations I had with him on the subject, though it made me so nervous at the time, have made me happier now, and if possible, increased my admiration and attachment to him. I feel secure now that she will avoid things of this kind for the future and though the sum is great, yet it will end well I am convinced.”19 Georgiana was not quite so sanguine as Bess because she feared that Heaton might interfere, “which I know will stop everything. However, I hope [the Duke] will be persuaded, it will require time and unfortunately the state of the debts will not allow of time.”20

  The Duke took so long to make up his mind that she had to borrow £800 from the Prince in the meantime. The decision, when it came, was more than generous. It took into account Georgiana’s requirements as well as her foolishness with money. Her income was doubled to £2,000 a year, but the extra thousand was consigned to Mssrs. Farrar and Altman, who were to be in charge of the liquidation of her debts. Her creditors would be paid by degrees, and by the time Hart came of age the restrictions in the fourth Duke’s will against raising a mortgage on the Cavendish estates would have expired, thereby allowing for the residue of Georgiana’s debts to be paid off in one lump sum. The Duke even saw to it that her extra expenses such as her opera box and charitable subscriptions would be taken care of by Mssrs. F and A. “I shall never have a plague of money,” Georgiana wrote joyfully to Little G. “I have kept from you the agitation which this has occaision’d. And am very happy and grateful to the blessed author of my happyness.21

  Matters were never simple where Georgiana’s finances were concerned, however, and even though she had made as full a confession as was possible for her, there were many debts which she had forgott
en or hoped had gone away. Once the news leaked out that the Duke of Devonshire was going to settle the Duchess’s debts, literally hundreds of creditors came forward with further claims. Some of them were genuine but others were frauds, and Georgiana herself had trouble distinguishing between the two. Six months after her confession, in July 1805, Harriet was disheartened by the lack of progress: “I [am] drove mad with every day hearing of some fresh Claim on my Sis., whose affairs are to be put into my hands as the only person she will entirely trust, and K. [the Duke] says he has so high an opinion of my integrity that if I give him my word that no new debt shall be enter’d into, that he will trust implicitly to me and not enquire the names or circumstances; but you cannot think how worrying this is.”22 For the rest of the year, more claims continued to trickle in, depriving Georgiana of the relief she had earned through her courage. A friend commented sadly, “The poor Duchess of D has had a severe attack in her bad eye and continues very unwell. I am fearful that the total derangement of her affairs, owing chiefly to her own imprudence is a material cause of her present illness and confinement.”23

  Shortly after her confession Georgiana suffered excruciating pain from another kidney stone. The entire household remained awake for several nights until it passed. Following the unpleasant experience, in the midst of her difficulties with her creditors, Georgiana felt a ghoulish sense of humour about her predicament, which she expressed in a short poem.