Blood Royal: The Story of the Spencers and the Royals

by John Pearson

  Georgiana was the prize creation of her two devoted parents-and particularly of her mother and namesake. Throughout Georgiana’s childhood, Lady Spencer’s passionate belief in education -combined with her social ambition - had consciously prepared her daughter for the great success her family expected.

  By sixteen she was already something of a prodigy. She had travelled widely, was well read, spoke fluent French and had all the social graces. Much of the charm of this tall, slim, slightly gawky girl with the grey eyes and the mass of reddish gold hair, lay in her unpretentiousness. It gave her something of the allure of a young unspoilt romantic heroine; and, from an early age, Georgiana clearly had something that no mother could ever teach a favourite daughter - magic.

  How else can one explain the extraordinary effect that she had had upon that most impassive aristocrat, the twenty-four-year-old William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, when she met him with her parents as they were taking the waters for Lord Spencer’s health at the fashionable Ardennes resort of Spa in the autumn of 1773. The Spencers had known William since he was a child, for the Cavendishes were another great Whig family, and even richer than the Spencers.

  The two families had similar origins. Both had come to prominence with the Tudors and, just as with the Spencers, the true founder of the Cavendish family, four times married Bess of Hardwick, had made her original fortune out of sheep. Since then the Cavendishes had advanced through a series of spectacular marriages, which had left them with the dukedom and no less than ten of the greatest houses in the country. These included Bess’s two original homes in Derbyshire, Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall, and in London they owned Devonshire House (opposite the present Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, and just across the Park from Spencer House), Burlington House (a few doors away towards today’s Piccadilly Circus and now housing the Royal Academy), and that jewel of Palladian architecture in West London, Lord Burlington’s Chiswick House. On the death of the fourth Duke of Devonshire in 1764, the dukedom, the houses and their great estates descended to the Duke’s motherless sixteen-year-old son, William, who would soon be hailed as ‘the Crown Prince of the Whigs’.

  But none of this had served to raise the young duke’s rather weary spirits. One writer called him ‘the perfect image of a wintry day’, and according to another, ‘constitutional apathy formed his distinguishing characteristic’. However, during the time at Spa something must have happened, for the Duke in his undemonstrative way was sufficiently excited by the young Georgiana to request her hand in marriage.

  While not discounting the impact of Georgiana’s presence on the wintry duke, he may have had some less romantic reasons for proposing. The pregnancy of his current mistress - a milliner whose name, by a strange coincidence, was Charlotte Spencer - may have reminded him that the time had come to think of producing legitimate heirs to his vast possessions. A further consideration which must certainly have crossed his mind was connected with that other great inheritance - the wealth and the estates with which Sarah Marlborough had so enriched the Althorp Spencers.

  True, Georgiana would not be first in line to inherit from her father, the already infirm Lord Spencer. First would come her brother, George, but as the Duke well knew, over recent years the Spencer males had not been healthy. The present Earl was ailing at the time. His father before him had died in his early thirties and, before that, Marlborough’s fortune had descended through the female line. As a betting man the Duke would certainly have known that the odds were not entirely against history repeating itself. His own mother, who had been the daughter of Lord Burlington, had brought the great Burlington inheritance to the Cavendishes on her father’s death, and with Georgiana Spencer, something similar might happen.

  All this apart, the Duke appeared to be in love - as much as he ever could be - and was positively eager for the wedding. So were Lord and Lady Spencer, knowing that such a chance would not come their way again. As for Georgiana, marriage to her Duke appeared to offer everything in life that she had ever wanted.

  There was one point on which everyone agreed - the need for secrecy. The Duke was a favourite subject for the gossip-mongers, and the populace, which could easily get out of hand in the days before the regular police, had to be kept in ignorance of the occasion. So on Saturday 4 June 1774, the Duke made a public show of partnering Georgiana at a ball in honour of the King’s birthday. They danced late, after which the Duke returned to Devonshire House and Georgiana to her parents’ house at Wimbledon. The following morning she was wakened early, attired in a silver dress with satin shoes and a silver head-dress set with pearls, then driven to the local parish church. The Duke was waiting, together with a few close members of Georgiana’s family, and just before matins her disreputable uncle, the Revd Charles Poyntz, performed the ceremony which made Georgiana Spencer, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday, wife of William Cavendish and Duchess of Devonshire.

  Georgiana was not conventionally beautiful. She was too tall for current tastes and her face lacked the classical perfection much admired at the time. But she was so obviously in love and full of life that even King George III was visibly impressed when she swept into his unfashionable court to be presented to him following her wedding. As Horace Walpole carefully explained, ‘The Duchess of Devonshire effaces all without being a beauty; but her youth, figure, flowing good nature, sense and lively modesty and modest familiarity, make her a phenomenon.’

  Garrick put it more succinctly. ‘Were I five and twenty, I could go mad about her. As I am past five and fifty, I would only suffer martyrdom for her.’ The one man who didn’t seem to feel the same about her was her husband.

  The Devonshires honeymooned together up at Chatsworth, the Duke’s great house in Derbyshire, known as the ‘Palace of the Peaks’. They rode and walked through the autumnal countryside and went to a ball at Chesterfield. But soon the Duke began to miss the company at his club, Brooks’s, the cold mackerel he enjoyed for breakfast after a long night’s gambling, and the company of Miss Charlotte Spencer who, unbeknown to his wife, had just given birth to a daughter. (Using their joint first names, the Duke and his mistress had christened her Charlotte Williams.)

  In his deadpan way the Duke still tried to make the honeymoon a success - as, with considerably more enthusiasm, did Georgiana. To surprise him she imported the great violinist, Giardiani, up from London, unaware of the Duke’s aversion to surprises and the fact that, being tone deaf like all the Cavendishes, he detested music. She lectured him about religion, and he agreed to having prayers recited every morning in his chapel. She invited her parents over from Althorp, and since, emotionally at least, the Duke was closer to them in age than to their daughter, they got on rather well together.

  On one thing Georgiana and her Duke were totally united - the need to make an heir. Even this, however, was not easy, and it was not until the following summer, just before her eighteenth birthday, that Georgiana discovered she was pregnant. But come October her father was writing to her from Paris to console her for having ‘fail’d making me a grandfather; however what has been may be again, and you will succeed better another time if you will have a little patience’.

  As the Earl must have known, patience was foreign to Georgiana’s nature and, back in London, she consoled herself as only someone with her energy and very grand position in the beau monde could. With dowdy Queen Charlotte sitting on the throne, the role of social queen of London was there for the taking - and Georgiana took it.

  This was a period when Whiggism, so long the political expression of the rich inheritors of the 1688 revolution, was turning into something very different. The so-called New Whigs, with Edmund Burke as their philosopher and Charles James Fox their parliamentary leader, had been agitating in support of the American colonies against the oppression of King George III and his prime minister, Lord North. These New Whigs were radical, libertarian and passionately ranged against the growing power of the King and his supporters. At the same time, Whig society itself was b
ecoming more sophisticated and fashionable than the predominantly masculine, hard-drinking gatherings of the political families who had ruled the country for so long under Robert Walpole. Shorn of much of their political power, Whig families like the Spencers, were switching their interest to the serious pursuit of pleasure.

  ‘As types of distilled civility,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, ‘the Whig aristocrats of 1770-1830 have never been surpassed or equalled’; and he rejoiced that ‘before respectability came to dull the skies of England, they were there, like fallow deer, to sparkle in the sun’. Few sparkled more entrancingly, or with less regard for drab respectability, than Georgiana.

  She was ideally suited for the role of queen of this frivolous yet highly civilized society. While not an intellectual, she had inherited sufficient of the Poyntz intelligence to match the conversation of Sheridan or Charles James Fox, and could lighten up the ‘cynical moroseness’ of the aged Dr Johnson when he came to Chatsworth. ‘He din’d here,’ she reported, ‘and does not shine quite so much in eating as conversing, for he eat much and nastily.’

  She was in fact a loyal friend, with a natural love of human beings; she had wit, a sometimes excessive sense of fun and she adored the social whirl. Above all, she clearly had that suspect but unstoppable quality - outrageous charm, and for a while it must have seemed that she could get away with anything.

  Once she was into her social stride, it was as if she had recreated all the power of the Spencers and Devonshires in her female image. By totally taking over Devonshire House, she made it something it had never been since William Kent rebuilt it following the fire of 1733 - the most fashionable great house in London. The Duke felt more at home at Brooks’s Club or Almack’s where he could gamble, drink and quote his favourite Latin authors in the presence of his ever faithful cronies. But in Devonshire House, with its great white and gilt reception rooms, and its spacious gardens in the midst of London, there ‘flowered the female aspect of Whiggism … Here in the flesh was the exquisite eighteenth-century world of Gainsborough, all flowing elegance and melting glances, and shifting silken colour’.

  The house became a unique institution, part Georgiana’s private salon, part fashionable show-place for the smart set, known as ‘the ton’, and also the political headquarters for the Foxite Whigs, who had now adopted the buff and blue of General Washington’s army to demonstrate support for ‘Liberty’ and the American revolution.

  By 1784, America had won its independence and Georgiana’s friends were now engaged in bitter parliamentary warfare with the newly appointed prime minister, twenty-four-year-old William Pitt, who enjoyed the backing - and the patronage - of their sworn enemy, King George III. This warfare culminated in a spring election, which the opposition Whigs already looked like losing, as did Fox himself, who was standing as a candidate in the ‘Peoples’ Constituency’ of Westminster.

  Unlike most constituencies, which were controlled by the Crown or the local landowners, at Westminster householders enjoyed the vote, and during a six-week long election, they had the right to return two candidates to parliament. The victory of the popular Pittite candidate, Lord Howe, was a foregone conclusion, and Fox’s challenge for the second seat was going badly when Georgiana effectively took charge of his campaign, using all her influence as fashion leader and unrivalled social celebrity against Pitt and the power of the King.

  Sarah Marlborough would have been proud of her great-great-granddaughter’s championing of sound Whig principles, and also of the way she was asserting the rights of women for an active role in politics. Whether she would have approved of the way Georgiana did this is another matter.

  No one had ever before seen anything remotely like what happened as the Duchess, her sister, Lady Bessborough, and her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Portland, dressed in fox furs and all their finery, unashamedly set out to bring the humblest of voters to the hustings in the cause of Liberty and Charles James Fox. Pitt’s supporters expressed outrage at the behaviour of these so-called ladies who were so blatantly offending social decency and feminine decorum in the scramble for votes. And when Fox, thanks entirely to Georgiana and the power of these upper-class ladies, won second place in the election and a seat in parliament the press attacks upon Georgiana grew.

  She had to bear the brunt of governmental fury, and the disapproval of a male-dominated society. She was shown no mercy by a scurrilous press, which accused her of the most appalling vices - from prostitution in return for votes, to encouraging revolution and undermining social order and propriety. It was a fearsome onslaught, and Georgiana’s reputation and her power in politics never recovered; nor, for many years to come, did the cause of women’s rights in politics. As Amanda Foreman writes in her recent biography of the Duchess, Georgiana’s ‘methods were too modern for eighteenth-century society … and it would be another hundred years before women once more ventured boldly into street politics as Georgiana had not been afraid to do in 1784.’

  For all her courage, and her loyalty to Charles James Fox, the fact remains that Georgiana had made herself vulnerable to attack because of the disorder of her private life. In the words of the diarist Charles Greville, ‘the private history of Devonshire House was very curious and amusing as a scandalous chronicle, an exhibition of vice in its most attractive form, full of grace, dignity, and splendour, but I fancy full of misery and sorrow also.’ Most of the ‘misery and sorrow’ now fell upon Georgiana.

  She and the Duke kept up appearances, but they had grown more incompatible than ever. He remained totally unimpressed by her social triumphs and, apart from desultory efforts to produce an heir which had twice resulted in Georgiana miscarrying, they had less and less to do with one another.

  By 1782 the marriage was effectively over, apart from the one task Georgiana was still required to perform - the creation of the all-important male heir to the dukedom. For however much the Duke neglected her, she felt that this was something she could not refuse him and his family. Early that April the ill-matched pair arrived in Bath, hoping the waters would alleviate the ducal gout and encourage the twenty-four-year-old Duchess to conceive. Neither happened. However, while at Bath they met the woman who would bring salvation of a sort to the Devonshire marriage.

  Acting as always with the very best intentions, the now widowed Lady Spencer had written to Georgiana at Bath asking her to contact the unfortunate Lady Elizabeth Foster, Lord Hervey’s daughter, who had recently been deserted by her husband. Georgiana did so, but instead of finding a pathetic victim, Lady Elizabeth proved to be a lively, very pretty creature, of much the same age as herself. Her father was the notorious ‘Earl Bishop’ who, while still Bishop of Derry, had inherited the rich earldom of Bristol from his brother and had been travelling on the Continent ever since, in such splendour that his name is remembered to this day in the countless ‘Hotels Bristol’ named after him.

  All this travelling had left Lord Hervey little time to bother with his daughter, but Georgiana and the Duke both found that they enjoyed her company. When they left Bath for the nearby town of Plympton, where the Duke was attending summer camp with the Volunteers, they asked Elizabeth - or Bess - to join them, and the trio got on splendidly together; the weary Duke no longer weary and the Duchess finding in Elizabeth the friend she felt she had always needed.

  Where the Devonshires were bored, Elizabeth was full of life and she made them laugh by giving them all pet names. The Duke was ‘Canis’, because of the way he loved his dogs, Georgiana was ‘Mrs Rat’ and Elizabeth was ‘Racky’, because of her irritating cough. ‘Canis’, ‘Mrs Rat’ and ‘Racky’ they would be until they died.

  Elizabeth was clearly something of a sexual tease. A devotee of slightly risqué novels, she introduced the Duke and Duchess to two of her favourite books - Laclos’s primer of refined seduction, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and the gospel of Romanticism, La Nouvelle Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She read them passages each evening, and by doing so may well have brought a little ‘soft ro
mantic feeling’ to what for Georgiana and the Duke must have been becoming an extremely basic chore.

  Perhaps as a result, Georgiana not only managed to conceive at Plympton, but also avoided miscarrying. By the end of the year her childless state was over and she was able to present the Duke with a pretty daughter, christened Georgiana Dorothy, but called ‘Little Gi’ within the family.

  It was an exciting moment for them all, and although Little Gi was not the longed for heir, she seems to have transformed the marriage. Georgiana felt fulfilled, the Duke believed that next time he would have a boy, and they were happier than they’d ever been together, thanks entirely to ‘Sister Racky’. In the euphoria, Sister Racky even persuaded Mrs Rat to accept Canis’s daughter, Charlotte Williams, into the family. The Duke was pleased, but worried by the possibility of scandal. Racky suggested a solution. She would take little Charlotte on an extended European holiday to put potential gossip mongers off the scent of her origins.

  This clearly suited Elizabeth, who was very much her father’s daughter and she spent several months enjoying herself travelling through Europe at the Duke’s expense, without letting Charlotte Williams cramp her style. She visited the sights of Italy, saw Florence, Rome and Pompeii, stayed with the Hamiltons in Naples and returned through Switzerland, where she visited Edward Gibbon and apparently had the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on his knees before her uttering words of tender adoration - or so she told her friends upon her return.

  Racky, accompanied by ‘her’ child, Charlotte, was fondly welcomed back to Chatsworth by Canis and Mrs Rat. Georgiana seems to have genuinely believed that her happiness was due entirely to the fact that ‘my dearest, loveliest friend and the man whom I love so much and to whom I owe everything, are united like brother and sister’. After Bess’s absence none could endure the thought of parting company again, and the trio returned to Devonshire House together. It was time for a fresh attempt to make an heir, and by Christmas time the Duchess was pregnant. And so was Elizabeth.