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18 Ibid., II, p. 345: Lady Bessborough to LGLG, Monday [August 1809].
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19 Stuart, Dearest Bess, p. 169: fifth Duke of Devonshire to LS, Oct. 17, 1809. Letter drafted in Lady Elizabeth Foster’s hand.
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20 A. Aspinall and Lord Bessborough,
eds., Lady Bessborough and Her Family Circle (London 1940), p. 194: Mar-quess of Hartington to Lady Caroline Lamb, Oct. 11, 1809.
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21 Lady Granville, Lord Granville Leveson Gower, II, p. 434: note by Lady Bess-borough, April 1812. Harryo became jealous and suspicious of Harriet—as her husband’s former mistress—and would not see her aunt unless forced to do so. Yet she adopted Harriet’s two children by him, Harriette Stewart and George Stewart. She doted on them, which must have been hard for Harriet, who rarely saw either child.
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22 BL Althorp f. 40: LS to Lady Elizabeth Foster, Dec. 9, 1809.
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23 Betty Askwith, Piety and Wit: A Biography of Harriet, Countess Granville (London 1982), p. 74.
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24 A. Francis Steuart, Diary of a Lady-in Waiting (London 1908), II, p. 18: Sir William Gell to Lady Charlotte Bury, July 1815.
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25 Stuart, Dearest Bess, p. 214.
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26 Brian Masters, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, (London 1981), p. 293.
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27 Virginia Surtees, A Second Self: The Letters of Harriet Granville 1810–1845 (London 1990), p. 182: Lady Harriet Leveson Gower to Lady Georgiana Morpeth, Sunday [April 11, 1824].
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28 Ibid., p. 53: Lady Harriet Leveson Gower to Lady Georgiana Morpeth, Friday [Oct. 30, 1812].
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29 L. Dutens, Memoirs of a Traveller in Retirement (London 1806), IV, p. 209.
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30 Lord Bessborough, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, p. 134: GD to M. de Calonne, Lundi [Sept. 1788].
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31 E. Chalus and H. Barker, eds., Gender in Eighteenth-Century England (London 1997), p. 19.
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32 For example, Richard Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity, Ideology and Socio-Cultural Formation in EighteenthCentury England (Cambridge 1988). Leppert states, “Females, young and
old alike, lived out their lives within the metaphorical or literal confines of domestic walls” (p. 29).
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33 For example, Sally Alexander, “Feminist History,” History Workshop Journal, 1 (1976).
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34 See the introduction in H. Barker and E. Chalus, eds., Gender in Eighteenth Century England.
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35 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging a Nation (Yale 1992), pp. 241ff.
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36 Women were self-conscious about appearing too interested in politics lest they encountered ridicule. Lady Stafford wrote to a friend in January 1805, “you see I write to you whatever comes uppermost just as I should talk to you, but to others I am more reserved and quiet, thinking it unbecoming for a female to meddle with Politics.” Sutherland MSS DB13/744: Lady Stafford to Lady Harriet Douglas, Jan. 16, 1805.
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37 They argue that it is outmoded and riddled with inconsistencies. For example, Amanda Vickery, “Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history,” Historical Journal 36, 2 (1993). See also Ann-Louise Shapiro, ed., Feminists Revision History (New Brunswick, NJ, 1994).
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38 Chatsworth 1873.9: GD to Marquess of Hartington, March 9, 1806.
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Footnotes
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Chapter 1
* Misspellings have been corrected only where they intrude on the text.
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* Georgiana became Lady Georgiana Spencer at the age of eight when her father, John Spencer, was created the first Earl Spencer in 1765. For the purpose of continuity the Spencers will be referred to as Lord and Lady throughout.
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† The usual method for estimating equivalent twentieth-century dollar values is to multiply by 100.
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* The Spencers originally came from Warwickshire, where they farmed sheep. They were successful businessmen, and with each generation the family grew a little richer. By 1508 John Spencer had saved enough capital to purchase the 300-acre estate of Althorp. He also acquired a coat of arms and a knighthood from Henry VIII. His descendants were no less diligent, and a hundred years later, when Robert Spencer was having his portrait painted for the saloon, he was at the head of one of the richest farming families in England. King James I, who could never resist an attractive young man, gave him a peerage and a diplomatic post to the court of Duke Frederick of Württemberg. From then on the Spencers left farming to their agents and concentrated on court politics.
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* His father, the Hon. John Spencer, was in fact a younger son and, given the law of pri-mogeniture, had always expected to marry his fortune or live in debt. However, his mother was the daughter of the first Duke of Marlborough, and the Marlboroughs had no heir. To prevent the line from dying out the Marlboroughs obtained special dispensation for the title to pass through the female line. John’s older brother Charles became the next Duke. John, meanwhile, became head of the Spencer family and subsequently inherited Althorp. Charles had inherited the title but, significantly, he had no right to the Marlborough fortune until his grandmother Duchess Sarah, the widowed Duchess of Marlborough, died. Except for Blenheim Palace, she could leave the entire estate to whomever she chose. Sarah had strong political beliefs and she was outraged when Charles disobeyed her instruction to oppose the government of the day. In retribution she left Marlborough’s £1 million estate to John, with the sole proviso that neither he nor his son should ever accept a government post.
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* My heart is yours. Keep it well.
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* Political life had not suited the reserved and honest Duke. But for the rivalry between Henry Fox and William Pitt, neither of whom would support a government with the other as its leader, George II would not have chosen this “amiable, straightforward man,” who was noted “for common sense rather than statesmanship.” The Duke shared with Lord Spencer, with whom he enjoyed a close friendship, a total lack of aptitude for the bravado of parliamentary politics. Dr. Johnson said of him, “If he promised you an acorn, and none had grown that year in his woods, he would have sent to Denmark for it.” But if asked to formulate a strategy for dealing with the French he sat there helplessly, waiting for someone to suggest an idea. He only participated in government out of a sense of duty and the effort it cost him ruined his health and destroyed his peace of mind.
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* In 1719 the Duke of Richmond, finding himself unable to meet his obligations, paid off his debts by agreeing to have his eighteen-year-old heir married to the thirteen-year-old daughter of the Earl of Cadogan. The ceremony took place almost immediately, after which the girl was returned to the nursery and did not see her husband again until she was sixteen.
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Chapter 2
* When French visitors attended aristocratic dinners they had difficulty with the table forks, and the English predilection for toasts bored them witless. Regarding the former, the usual complaint, as expressed by Faujas de Saint-Fond, was that they “prick my mouth or my tongue with their little sharp steel tridents.” Regarding the latter, it was their inordinate number. The practice of proposing and replying continued throughout the dinner and with even more vigour after the women had left. Toasting the ladies, th
e food, each other, and whatever else came to mind went on for so long there were chamber pots in each corner, and “the person who has occasion to use it does not even interrupt his talk during the operation.” André Parreaux, Daily Life, p. 36.
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* On one occasion she met the celebrated Dr. Johnson, who was visiting a friend in the neighbourhood. The Devonshires were as gratified to be in his presence as he was in theirs. Georgiana was awed by his conversation but, she noted, “he din’d here and does not shine quite so much in eating as in conversing, for he ate much and nastily.” Chatsworth MSS 644: GD to LS, September 4–10, 1784. Nevertheless, she sat next to him throughout the day and, according to Nathaniel Wraxall, was “hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson’s lips. . . . All the cynic moroseness of the philosopher and moralist seemed to dissolve under so flattering [an] approach.” Nathaniel Wraxall, Posthumous and Historical Memoirs of My Own Time (London 1904), I, pp. 113–14.
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Chapter 3
* Georgiana was not herself a snob. When Monsieur Tessier, the celebrated French actor, visited England the Duchess of Manchester refused to speak to him because he earned his living. Her behaviour disgusted Georgiana, and to make the point she danced with him at Almack’s.
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* Sheridan’s friend and biographer Thomas Moore remembered his hatred of perceived rivals: “It was Burke chiefly that S. hated and envied (they indeed hated each other)—Being both Irishmen—both adventurers—they had every possible incentive to envy.” Wil-frid S. Dowden, ed., The Journal of Thomas Moore (London 1983), I, p. 161.
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* Hare’s seat in Parliament—courtesy of the Duke—was the only barrier between him and debtors’ prison. He was fortunate enough to be the grandson of a bishop, but also un-fortunate in being the son of an apothecary. He had gambled away his small inheritance and thereafter survived as a permanent house guest in Whig society. He was stick-thin, with a face so white he appeared more dead than alive.
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* Apparently the Queen’s brother-in-law surprised them one day while they were making up after an argument, hugging each other tightly and kissing each other’s tear-stained cheeks. He burst out laughing and left, saying, “Pray don’t let me disturb you!” and told everybody how he had interrupted the two friends.
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* Fox even brought a few of his friends to near bankruptcy by persuading them to provide security for him in the form of annuities to money-lenders. At one point the Earl of Carlisle was paying one sixth of his income towards the interest on Fox’s debts. Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford 1991), p. 102.
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* Contemporary descriptions show how peculiar this uniform was: “The gamesters began by pulling off their embroidered clothes, and putting on frieze greatcoats, or turned their coats inside outwards for good luck. They put on pieces of leather (such as are worn by footmen when they clean knives) to save their laced ruffles; to shield their eyes from the light and hold up curls, etc., they wore high-crowned straw hats with broad brims, adorned with flowers and ribbons: [and] masks to conceal their emotions when they played at quinze.” J. Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London 1872), p. 72.
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* When he wrote his memoirs in 1801 Colonel George Hanger, a former lover of Lady Melbourne’s, claimed that several ladies in the Devonshire House Circle had fallen into the same trap.
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† In circumstances very similar to the suicide of Mrs. Damer’s husband in 1775.
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Chapter4
* Georgiana had learned the importance of “mixing” from her first days of married life when the Duke had sent her off to Derby to foster good relations with the local voters. She also knew, without the Cavendishes having to tell her, that her behaviour had political implications. The year before at Brighton she wrote, “we are very popular here from mixing so much with the people, for Lady Sefton and Mrs Meynel never mixed with the people till we came.”
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* I cannot feel at ease.
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* Educated opinion excoriated the doctor as a charlatan and his patients as pathetic gullibles, but this did not prevent the credulous from seeking his help. Infertile couples paid an exorbitant £50 a night to make love on the “electro-magnetic bed” in his “celestial chamber” to the strains of an orchestra playing outside, while a pressure-cylinder pumped “magnetic fire” into the room. It was also recommended that they drink from Graham’s patented elixir, costing a guinea a bottle. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser ran a successful campaign against Graham, pillorying both him and his clients and eventually he went bankrupt in 1782.
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Chapter 5
* To make a baby.
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* The patriarchal right to “discipline and punnish” a wife was not in question. If there was any doubt, a judge’s verdict on a case in 1782 resolved the issue. He declared that, if there was a good cause, a husband could legally beat his wife so long as the stick was no thicker than his thumb. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce (Oxford 1990), p. 201.
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* In 1797 Lady Buckinghamshire and Lady Elizabeth Luttrell were actually arrested and fined £50 each for running a gambling concern with a faro-banker in Lady Buckinghamshire’s house.
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Chapter 6
* She was referring to Bess’s grandfather Lord Hervey, who died before he could become the second Earl of Bristol. Despite suffering from severe epilepsy and general ill-health, Lord Hervey was, for a time, a brilliantly successful courtier. He recorded his career in the witty and scabrous Memoirs of George II, which was published after his death. Although he married the clever and beautiful Molly Lepel, his real love was for Stephen Fox, Charles Fox’s uncle. The poet Alexander Pope wrote a vicious poem about him: “Amphibious thing! that acting either part,/The Trifling head, or the corrupted heart/Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,/Now trips a lady, now struts a lord . . .”
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† George, the eldest son of Lord Hervey, died unmarried. The second son, Augustus, who became the third Earl of Bristol, did so in a blaze of scandal. Many years before, he had secretly married Elizabeth Chudleigh, a rambunctious lady-in-waiting at court with ambition and a reputation to match. The alliance was short-lived and both of them agreed to maintain the pretence of there never having been a marriage. Elizabeth then married the Duke of Kingston, who knew nothing of her previous life, but after the Duke died her past was exposed in a court case over the will. The Countess-Duchess—as Horace Walpole called her—was tried for bigamy in the House of Lords in 1776 in front of 6,000 spectators. One of the many peeresses who crammed into the gallery during the lengthy trial was Georgiana. Because of her age and status, the Duchess of Kingston escaped branding on the hand, the usual punishment, and was allowed to retire abroad. Augustus was condemned for conniving in the deception and his punishment was severe: the Lords insisted the original marriage was indissoluble, thus depriving him of legitimate heirs.
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* There is also a vague hint in surviving letters that Bess had become, or contemplated becoming, the mistress of that great seducer the Duke of Dorset. The clues come from gossip repeated by Lady George Cavendish, who baldly stated that Bess had an affair with Dorset, but also from some little admissions in Bess’s own letters. In one fragment she refers to her separation from Mr. Foster and that she told him, “I never would quit him in any misfortune—it was after all that, that he went down to Ickworth and my mother would not see him. Yet I think I should not have answered at all, but to deny the thing.” She does not say what she should have denied to Mr. Foster, except that they were “imprudencies, which though no cause of my separation were subjects of blame.” Chatsworth 532.4: Be
ss to GD, circa Sept. 1783.
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* But that is not possible. Forgive me, my angel. I believe I say these terrible things merely in order to hear them contradicted.
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Chapter 7
* William Pitt the Elder had so loathed his rival that in 1756, while advising the Duke of Devonshire on the new ministry, he blocked Henry Fox’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in favour of a less qualified colleague. The Fox family’s resentment knew no bounds after Pitt received an earldom from George III in 1763, when two years previously Henry Fox had been fobbed off with a mere barony.
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Chapter 8
* Newspapers were unsure whether to congratulate Georgiana or commiserate with the Duke. The Morning Herald was typical: “We are extremely happy to inform our read-ers that her Grace the Duchess of Devonshire was brought to bed on Saturday morning at 5 o’clock. . . . the satisfaction on this happy occasion is perhaps a little impaired by the sex of the infant. . . . The complimentary enquiries yesterday at Devonshire House were more numerous and from persons of higher distinction than were, perhaps, ever known under similar circumstances.” Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, July 14, 1783.
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* Georgiana also lent money without bothering to reclaim it. Lady Charlotte Bury recorded: “I have often heard it told of her that if she had money set apart for pleasure, or for repayment of debts, and that when some individual came to her in pecuniary distress, she would always relieve him or her, and leave her own difficulties unprovided for. Often-times she was wrong in doing so. . . . One must be just before one is generous. But it is impossible not to be charmed by the kindly impulse which made her, without a moment’s hesitating, shield another from distress.” A. Francis Steuart, ed., The Diary of a Lady-in-Waiting (London 1908), II, p. 35.
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