The Cardinal Consalvi was Bess’s last great love. “No girl of fifteen ever betrayed a more romantic passion for her lover than did this distinguished, but then antiquated lady for the Cardinal,” wrote Sir William. The Cardinal had the thankless job of the Pope’s Secretary of State. He shared Bess’s interest in classical architecture and antiquities and helped her to plan her own excavation site in the Forum. “That Witch of Endor the Duchess of Devon,” Lady Spencer wrote just before she died on March 18, 1814, “has been doing mischief of another to what she has been doing all her life by pretending to dig for the public good in the Forum.”25 Bess made Italy her permanent home, although she sometimes visited England and eventually regained her former influence with Hart, much to Little G’s and Harryo’s annoyance. She died in Rome on March 30, 1824, eighteen years to the day after Georgiana’s death. A locket carrying one of her friend’s reddish-gold curls, and also a hair bracelet of Georgiana’s, were next to her bed. Hart was at Bess’s side during her last moments, and so, surprisingly, was Georgiana’s daughter Eliza Courtney, now Mrs. Ellice.26 Afterwards Hart arranged for Bess’s remains to be brought to England and interred alongside those of Harriet, who had died three years previously in 1821, and Georgiana and the Duke.
Georgiana’s daughters had mixed feelings when they heard the news of Bess’s death. “It has shocked us very much, she had so much enjoyment of life and I feel so unhappy and anxious about poor Mrs. Lamb [Caroline St. Jules],” wrote Harryo. “It also brings past times to one’s mind, and many nervous and indefinable feelings. This is a bitter cup, dearest sister.”27 The eight children belonging to Georgiana and Bess: Hart, Little G, Harryo, Eliza Courtney, Caroline St. Jules, [Augustus] Clifford, and Frederick and Augustus Foster remained on good terms with each other all their lives. Bess’s Caroline was fortunate in enjoying a close relationship with Georgiana’s children that circumstances denied to Eliza Courtney. On the other hand, Caroline’s marriage to George Lamb was a tragic mistake—it was never consummated—while Eliza was extremely happy with Robert Ellice. Harryo was forbearing about her half-brother and step-brothers.
Clifford and the two Fosters are here, but it does very well [she wrote on October 30, 1812] Clifford is improved in looks but in conversation he really is nothing and his constant little nervous laugh makes even his silence appear less negative than that of another person. I am very kind but with the “Spirits low that bore bestows.” He has no conversation at all and having quite left off the familiarity and childishness of manner he once had, he has nothing at all in its place. F. Foster is in tearing spirits and most excessively amusing. A. Foster rather better than he used to be.28
Hart took his duties as head of the family very seriously.* He looked after all the interests of his siblings; his first act on becoming the sixth Duke was to raise Harryo’s marriage portion from £10,000 to £30,000. He also paid Thomas Coutts some of the money that was still outstanding from Georgiana’s debts. Clifford particularly benefited from Hart’s help: through his influence he received the royal appointment of Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod and was eventually made a baronet. Frederick Foster, who settled down to become a country gentleman, and Augustus, who was knighted in 1835 for his services to diplomacy, were frequent visitors to Chatsworth. Georgiana’s two legitimate daughters never achieved, nor sought, the celebrity of their mother, although Harryo and Leveson Gower presided over the British embassy in Paris with great éclat for almost seventeen years.
Hart did not fulfil Georgiana’s expectations; his deafness prevented him from entering politics or playing a significant role in the Whig party. He never married and died childless at the age of sixty-eight in 1858, which meant that the title moved sideways to his second cousin William Cavendish. During his lifetime Hart displayed many of Georgiana’s traits. He was a serious collector of minerals, an enthusiastic modernizer who spent hundreds of thousands of pounds altering and improving Chatsworth and Devonshire House, and a famously generous host. As well as enjoying the sisterly adoration of Harryo and Little G, Hart was a popular society figure. However, when Georgiana told him, “I see in you still more perhaps than even in them [the girls] what my youth was,” she may have been hinting at something in Hart which only became clear in adulthood. He imitated the pattern of her life by maintaining close, passionate friendships with members of his own sex. He formed a lifelong attachment to the gardener and architect Joseph Paxton, who lived with his wife in a house on the Chatsworth estate. Their relationship provoked comment but not scandal and Hart led a contented if unremarkable life.
Georgiana’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine was typical of the notices which appeared following her death. It praised her compassion, spirit, and intelligence, calling them “qualities . . . of a rare and superior kind.” But it was Louis Dutens in his memoirs who best described Georgiana’s effect on her generation. “Without any intention, she became the directress of the ton. She changed the hours, and set the fashions. Everybody endeavoured to imitate her, not only in England, but even at Paris. Everyone enquired what [Georgiana] did, and how she dressed, anxious to act and dress in the same style. She had an uncommon gracefulness in her air rather than her figure; and appeared always to act entirely from the impression of the moment.”29
However, just as no painter ever captured a true likeness of Georgiana during her life, no obituary conveyed the true complexity of her character after her death. Georgiana was pre-eminently a woman of paradoxes. She once confided to Alexandre Calonne, just before the Regency crisis in 1788, “I have opened my heart to you and you have seen that despite all my gaiety, it is often quite tormented.”*30 She wrote in a similar vein to Mary Graham in 1778, and to Sir Philip Francis twenty-one years later in 1799. Throughout her adult life Georgiana struggled to reconcile the contradictions that enveloped her. She was an acknowledged beauty yet unappreciated by her husband, a popular leader of the ton who saw through its hypocrisy, and a woman whom people loved who was yet so insecure in her ability to command love that she became dependent upon the suspect devotion of Lady Elizabeth Foster. She was a generous contributor to charitable causes who nevertheless stole from her friends, a writer who never published under her own name, a devoted mother who sacrificed one child to save the other three, a celebrity and patron of the arts in an era when married women had no legal status, a politician without a vote, and a skilled tactician a generation before the development of professional party politics.
Georgiana should be credited with being one of the first to refine political messages for mass communication. She was an image-maker who understood the necessity of public relations, and she became adept at the manipulation of political symbols and the dissemination of party propaganda. The two-party system was still developing in the late eighteenth century and factions, with their problems of discipline and dependence upon personality, predominated. Despite this, Georgiana was successful in helping to foster a sense of collective membership among the Foxite Whigs; and she made Devonshire House the focal point for meetings during critical times, such as the Westminster election and the Regency crisis. She was simultaneously a public figurehead for the Whigs and an effective politician within the party. The faction leaders obeyed her summonses, sought her advice, employed her to negotiate, and relied on her to maintain the morale of supporters.
Dedicating herself to the Whig cause and to Fox’s success (the two being inextricable in her mind), Georgiana achieved a number of political victories during what can legitimately be called her thirty-year career. First, she used her considerable powers of persuasion to prevent the Prince from splitting the Fox-North Coalition in 1783. The following year she rescued Fox from electoral defeat with her courageous campaign in the Westminster election. During the subsequent wilderness years before and after the 1789 Regency crisis, Georgiana succeeded in recruiting new blood to the party and in helping to stem the flow of desertions. Later, she was one of the leading instigators of the Fox-Grenville Coalition of 1804. More important,
she held the Coalition together in 1805, when she once again persuaded the Prince not to desert the Whigs. It was her persistence which helped to sustain the momentum for the 1806 “Ministry of all the Talents.” No other woman—indeed, very few men—achieved as much influence as Georgiana wielded during her lifetime.
Georgiana was not alone, however, in the duties she performed as a political wife. Her career exemplifies the political access granted to aristocratic women when politics was still a family enterprise. Lady Melbourne, Mrs. Crewe, and Lady Salisbury, for example, were expected to “work” by being prominent in the local community. They helped their male kin to fight elections, and used family and social ties to promote the careers of relatives. During the parliamentary season they presided over salons, organized political suppers, and provided opportunities for factions to mingle. They were the conduits for messages and the facilitators of meetings and informal alliances. They were no less partisan than the men and were sometimes more so: during the Regency crisis Foxite and Pittite hostesses struck off the opposition from their invitation lists.
By contrast, aristocratic women in the nineteenth century were granted considerably less access to politics. As the national mood swung against the “lassitudes” of the eighteenth century women were perceived as having been far too active in male preserves such as politics and business, and were encouraged to be content with domestic occupations. Femininity became equated with the home, the family, and religion, while masculinity became more strongly identified with the work place, politics, and power.31 The accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 had a further dampening effect on women’s participation in public life, as did the professionalization of party politics. Middle-class participation, the growth of centralized party control over constituencies, and the transformation of politics from public service into a vocational career, all contributed to the exclusion of women. They were never entirely removed, as the lives of Lady Palmerston, Princess Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador to London from 1812, and Lady Waldegrave make clear, but nineteenth-century women were denied the same degree of political co-operation as their predecessors.
Ironically, Georgiana’s political achievements, not to mention the activities of her female contemporaries, have been obscured by the rigidity of modern academic fashion. Most political historians generally follow a conservative approach and ignore the role of women tout court. Most feminist historians concentrate on “women’s occupations” and therefore ignore the world of high politics. Marxist history, which is strongly allied to feminist history, concentrates on the lives of the many—the middle and working classes—at the expense of the few—the aristocracy. As a result, the theoretical model that has dominated women’s history for the past three decades, the so-called “separate spheres” model, is a hybrid of class and gender theory. It argues that women lived in sealed communities, without autonomy or direction, being little more than passive victims of the whims of men who dominated social and institutional life.32 The model also stresses the “sisterhood” of women, their separate consciousness from men, and their shared suffering from the effects of capitalism and patriarchy.33
Such an approach denies the experiences of a Duchess of Devonshire or a Duchess of Gordon as relevant or significant. Yet Georgiana’s life is representative of a vital part of eighteenth-century society. Male and female relations were robust, multi-layered, and contradictory. Neither the public and private nor the social and political realms existed as separate entities. They blurred into each other, making divisions often subtle and nuanced. Rather than being an anomaly, Georgiana’s political career demonstrates the fluidity which characterized relations between the sexes. The propensity of women’s historians to ignore high politics, and of political historians to ignore women, has resulted in a profound misunderstanding of one of the most sexually integrated periods of British history.
A more appropriate model for the eighteenth century would be one of interlocking spheres, recognizing the flexibility of social conventions of the era: women’s lives reflected the shifting patterns of society and were equally susceptible to the pressures caused by class, locality, economy, and age.34 The perceived “proper role” of women was a much-debated question which led to disagreements between family members, both within the aristocracy and in society as a whole. Georgiana herself agonized about whether she was pushing the limits of her role too far. On the other hand, she continued to explore those limits until the time of her death. Nor was she alone. Linda Colley’s study of women’s political and social participation at the end of the century led her to conclude that they were much more active than the literature of the time would have us believe. The vociferous critics who called for women to remain in the domestic sphere were fighting a rearguard action against the great number who were already outside it.35
At various times Georgiana had access to real power and encountered men who were willing for her to use it. At others, she was barred from participation at the joint instigation of her male and female contemporaries.36 The pattern of her friendships was similarly complex. Georgiana had close and confiding relationships with members of both sexes. Though it would not be appropriate to apply twentieth-century preconceptions about heterosexual and homosexual behaviour to Georgiana’s relationships with Mary Graham and Lady Elizabeth Foster—the evidence remains inconclusive—if, indeed, Georgiana and Bess were lovers it would merely confirm that eighteenth-century sexuality was no less inclusive than its modern counterpart.
Historians have begun to question the idea that in the eighteenth century women and men lived in distinctly separate spheres.37 Georgiana’s political career is a compelling example of how such a view contradicts the reality of eighteenth-century life, stripping it of its richness and diversity. Her history is as much a part of the history of men and the wider world as it is of the women’s community. She is remarkable for being a successful politician whose actions brought about national events; for attaining great prominence in spite of the fact she was a woman in a society which favoured men; and for achieving these successes while enduring great personal suffering in her search for self-fulfilment.
Long after the scattering of the Whig party and the destruction of Devonshire House Georgiana continues to fascinate because of her single-minded determination to be the heroine of her own story. “I was but one year older than you when I launched into the vortex of dissipation—a Duchess and a beauty,” Georgiana wrote to Hart three weeks before she died, “however . . . all that I have seen never weaken’d my principles to devotion to almighty God or took from my love of virtue and my humble wishes to do what is right.”38
NOTES
1: DÉBUTANTE
1 Carlisle MSS J18/20/95: GD to Lady Georgiana Morpeth, August 1799.
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2 L. Dutens, Memoirs of a Traveller in Retirement (London 1806), IV, p. 209.
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3 Spencer MSS at Althorp: Mrs. Spencer to Thea Cowper, Sept. 30, 1758.
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4 Chatsworth MSS [henceforth Chatsworth] 22: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire [GD] to Lady Spencer [LS], Sept. 23, 1774.
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5 E. S. de Beer, ed., The Diary of John Evelyn (Oxford 1959), p. 886.
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6 Joseph Friedman, Spencer House: The Chronicle of a Great London Mansion (London 1993), p. 194.
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7 D. Douglas, ed., The Letters and Journals of Lady Mary Coke (Edinburgh 1889–96), I, p. 96.
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8 Brian Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer (London 1957), pp. 46–7.
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9 BL Althorp MSS [henceforth BL Al-thorp] F122: Miss Georgiana Poyntz to Miss Thea Cowper, [1754].
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10 Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany (London 1861–2), IV, p. 186.
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11 Friedman, Spencer House, p. 55.
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12 Brian Masters, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London 1981), p. 4.
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13 A. Aspinall and Lord Bessborough, eds., Lady Bessborough and Her Family Circle (London 1940), p. 23.
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14 Ibid., p. 27.
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15 BL Althorp F40: LS to first Earl Spencer, [Oct. 26, 1769].
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16 BL Althorp F37: LS to GD, July 17 [1768].
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17 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London 1979), p. 276.
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18 BL Althorp F183: Althorp household accounts.
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19 Chatsworth 7: Lord Althorp to GD, April 14, 1773.
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20 BL Althorp F40: GD to first Earl and Countess Spencer, March 16, 1764.
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21 W. T. Whiteley, Artists and Their Friends in England 1700–1799 (London 1928), II, p. 397.
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22 Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer, p. 51.
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23 Spencer MSS at Althorp House: diary of Mrs. Poyntz, August 27, 1763.
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The Duchess Page 48
