Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Born on June 7th 1757, the eldest child of John, 1st Earl Spencer, Georgiana married Britain’s most eligible bachelor, William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire on her seventeenth birthday. In her fascinating biography, Amanda Foreman postulates the theory that Georgiana was in love with the idea of being in love, that she assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that William was like her father: outwardly reserved due to shyness, but with depths of sensitivity and warmth once you got to know him. But William was a cold fish at 24, and saw little reason to change the lifestyle he’d been used to merely because he had acquired a wife. He continued to spend many a night at the gaming table with friends, and to see his mistress, and left Georgiana to organise her own social diary, only requiring her to host political meetings at home in Chatsworth occasionally, and to produce a male heir. At the time it was not considered bon ton for a married couple to be seen out together too much.

When she was 20, Georgiana wrote a novel in which she describes the life of a naive country girl who falls for a wealthy aristocratic rake and marries him when she is just seventeen. Any similarities with persons living or dead is purely intentional. The heroine’s life is portrayed as “a continual bustle without having literally anything to do”. The extravagent styles of the time meant that hours were spent merely dressing for dinner, and more hours dressing the hair in huge towering styles topped with feathers, fruit or even a sailing ship. These styles were quite perilous, sometimes catching fire on the chandeliers, and uncomfortable for the women who had to crouch on the floor of their carriages to accomodate the big hair.

But Georgiana herself found plenty to do. Apart from her literary aspirations – not only the novel, but also poetry and co-operation with the playwright Sheridan –  she was active as leader of fashion and society, as political hostess and as campaigner for the Whig party, and later in life she also built a museum standard collection of minerals. If she nevertheless found her life a little empty and became addicted to gambling, then I think it’s quite forgivable. As she said herself years later: “Before you condemn me, remember that at 17 I was a toast, a beauty and a Duchess, and wholly neglected by my husband.”

The gambling unfortunately got completely out of hand: at one stage a combination of overspend on her clothing money and gambling debts mounted to a staggering 100,000 pounds, the equivalent of six million pounds in today’s terms. By this time she had suffered several miscarriages and had produced only one daughter so far, so I fear she was not fulfilling her side of the deal. Her best friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster had insinuated herself into the Devonshire household, making sure that she was invaluable to both Georgiana and the Duke. When Georgiana, hounded by creditors, at last owned up to at least part of the financial trouble she was in, her husband demanded a separation. There was much debate between her family and his as to where she should live, what provision would be made for her. However, interestingly enough, Lady Bess chose to go with her if she left. The point is that although a mistress was tacitly accepted in eighteenth century polite society, the matter had to be handled discreetly. Lady Bess was sent away to France when she became pregnant with the Duke’s child, and there was certainly no question of her being able to go on living with the Duke if the Duchess was not there to lend a semblance of propriety to the arrangement. This was the most famous ménage à trois of the eighteenth century, but that can only work if there is a balance of needs and wishes amongst the three members; the Duke was happy to have the two women curb each other’s extravagances a little, he may well have found an advantage in playing them off against each other, apart from the obvious sexual variety, but the two women also needed each other. Georgiana needed affection and friendship, and Lady Bess needed Georgiana to give her position legitimacy.

There was a measure of reconciliation between the Duke and Georgiana, and she did produce the much needed male heir in 1790. Bess and Georgiana were travelling together on the Continent at the time, and there was much whispering that the boy was Bess’s, but he was accepted as the Duke’s legitimate heir. This was not only a question of honour or family pride: a male heir meant that the estates would stay in that branch of the family, thus a mortgage could be raised on the land. Finances – yes, that remained a problem all her life as she never managed to admit the real level of debt she was in, and was plagued by money-lenders, creditors and bankers for the rest of her days.

She lived at the time of the American and French revolutions, she was involved in the struggles of the Whig party to counter the power and influence of the King and she was one of the first ‘celebrities’. The eighteenth century saw the rise of newspaper publishing in Europe and slandered her politicking methods in satirical cartoons. Little of this side of her life comes through in the film The Duchess, with Keira Knightley in the title role. It concentrates on her marriage, probably in order to emphasise the similarities between her life and that of her famous descendant, the Princess of Wales, who notoriously said that there were three people in her marriage – and so it was a little crowded. There were three people in Georgiana’s marriage too, but the lasting impression I gained from Amanda Foreman’s excellently researched book is that it was an arrangement that worked. That’s not to say that there were equal rights between men and women, when Georgiana took a lover herself, that was not tolerated and the child she had with Charles Grey had to be born in secret and given up to the Grey family. Georgiana managed to maintain an interest in the little girl, acting as her godmother, but Eliza Courtney grew up believing that Charles Grey was her much older brother.

Georgiana lived to see her two daughters come out into society and make good marriages. She was troubled with health problems, headaches and a vicious infection that left her sightless in one eye. She died at the age of 48, of what was thought to be an abscess of the liver.