Before Georgiana’s entry into the ton Lady Melbourne had reigned as its leading hostess. People naturally assumed that they would become rivals, but Lady Melbourne had no intention of setting herself up in opposition to Georgiana. She befriended her and adopted the role of benign older counsel instead. ‘My dearest Thémire’ (the French term for Themis, the Goddess of Justice) was how Georgiana usually addressed her. Lady Melbourne was a natural manager of people. She had a firm grasp of the recondite laws which governed life within the ton, and an unsentimental, even cynical view of humanity. ‘Never trust a man with another’s secret,’ she is reputed to have said, ‘never trust a woman with her own.’ Ferociously practical and discreet, she could also be sarcastic and cutting when irritated. Georgiana was in awe of her temper; ‘I believe I have been a little afraid of you,’ she once admitted.11 ‘Pray write to me, tell me that you love me and are not angry with me,’ she pleaded on another occasion.12
Lady Melbourne provided the comradeship that was missing in Georgiana’s relationship with her mother. Lady Spencer was always commenting and offering advice, but it was hardly ever of the practical kind that could help her daughter out of scrapes. She was too far removed from the Circle to understand the sort of pressures that it exerted. Jealous of Lady Melbourne’s influence, she tried to make Georgiana drop her. Uncharacteristically, Georgiana refused to obey:
I conjure you my Dst. Mama to forgive my warmth about Lady Melbourne today [she wrote after a painful argument]. But I do assure you that everything I have known of her has been so right and her conduct to me so truly friendly and for my good, [that] I was miserable to see her so low in your opinion – I hope you will not object to my continuing a friendship which it would be so terrible for me to break off, and I am sure that next year from a thousand things you will not have to be uneasy about my goings on.13
Georgiana’s ‘goings on’ had become an obsession with the press. Her clothes, her movements, her friends – in short anything new or unusual about her – was considered newsworthy. Rarely did a week go by without a snippet of gossip appearing somewhere. On 30 December 1776 the Morning Post reported that Georgiana and Lady Jersey had all their friends playing ‘newly invented aenigmas’ which, the Post learned, they called ‘charades’.14 Throughout 1777 a series of anonymous publications appeared addressed to Georgiana, some of them attacking her slavish devotion to fashion, others defending her.15 More often, though, the scandal sheets embroiled her in fictitious escapades with numerous lovers. There were enough stories of licentious behaviour attached to members of the Circle to give any allegation the veneer of plausibility.
Audiences flocked to Drury Lane in May 1777 to see Sheridan’s new play The School for Scandal, partly because it was known to be a satire on the Devonshire House Circle. ‘I can assure you that the Farce is charming,’ enthused Mrs Crewe to Lady Clermont; ‘the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Worseley, and I cut very good figures in it.’16 Sheridan pandered to the audience’s expectations by portraying Georgiana’s friends as a set of louche aristocrats whose moral sensibilities had been blunted by a life of wealth without responsibility. Georgiana is Lady Teazle: young, easily influenced, possessed of a good heart but needing a firm husband to manage her properly. As the play opens Sir Peter Teazle is quarrelling with Lady Teazle over her spendthrift ways and her preoccupation with fashion. ‘I’m sure I’m not more extravagant than a woman of fashion ought to be,’ she retorts. The evil Lady Sneerwell (a mixture of Lady Jersey and Lady Melbourne) connives with the journalist Snake (Sheridan) and Joseph Surface to bring about Lady Teazle’s ruin. But the play ends with Lady Teazle resisting Surface’s attempt to seduce her and renouncing her scandal-loving friends as worthless and silly. Members of the Circle thought it was a tremendous joke to see themselves caricatured on stage, and helped to publicize the play by ostentatiously arriving en masse to watch the first night.
Georgiana’s thoughts on being portrayed as Lady Teazle have not survived, but the play almost certainly made her uneasy. Behind the broad humour was a semi-serious message which did not escape her notice. ‘I am alarm’d at my own dispositions because I think I know them now,’ she told Lady Spencer in August. ‘I am afraid that the minute I think seriously of my conduct I shall be so shocked, especially with regard to all that has happened this year …’17 Lacking the maturity and confidence to stand up to her friends, Georgiana was being drawn into a life of heavy drinking and compulsive gambling. She often found herself acting against her own judgement but she felt unable to resist the pressures on her to conform.
In November 1777 Lady Sarah Lennox observed that Georgiana seemed to have no ballast. ‘The Pretty Duchess of Devonshire who by all accounts has no faults but delicate health in my mind, dines at seven, summer as well as winter, goes to bed at three, and lies in bed till four: she has hysteric fits in the morning and dances in the evening; she bathes, rides, dances for ten days and lies in bed the next ten.’ Georgiana made periodic attempts to reform. As often as she could she presented Lady Spencer with a positive picture of her life, emphasizing the time she spent with the Duke, her involvement in charity work, the frequent prayers she said and the sermons she heard. ‘You see my dearest Mama, how happy I am to tell you of anything I think you will approve of,’ she had written in September 1776; ‘it gives me such real pleasure to feel that I am doing anything that makes me more pleasing to the best of mothers.’18 Inspired by such sentiments, Georgiana would adopt a starvation diet, lock herself away in her room and see no one for a week, but as soon as she emerged she compensated with all-night drinking and eating binges until she was too exhausted to get out of bed. Her weight fluctuated wildly as a consequence. ‘You are very apt to be too much so, and run into extremes which your constitution will not bear,’ Lady Spencer complained.19 The effect on Georgiana’s general health was catastrophic: she had one miscarriage after another, leading the Duke and the Cavendishes to accuse her of deliberately sabotaging their hopes for an heir. Only Lady Sarah Lennox questioned whether the Duke might not be to blame for neglecting Georgiana when she was young and so vulnerable to suggestion. ‘Indeed,’ she concluded, ‘I can’t forgive her or rather her husband, the fault of ruining her health.’20
Just as Lady Sarah Lennox made her astute observation, towards the end of 1777, Georgiana met two quite different people, Charles James Fox and Mary Graham, whose impact on her would have far-reaching consequences. She was introduced to Mary in October while taking the sea air in Brighton. Mary was there with her husband, Thomas, and was recuperating from a bout of pneumonia. Georgiana was there in the hope of improving her fertility. Medical opinion cited a weak placenta as the cause of serial miscarriages like Georgiana’s; the only remedy was to take water cures, either bathing in sea water or drinking warm spa water. (There was no concept of male infertility in the eighteenth century, except in cases of impotence.)
Georgiana was immediately captivated by her. ‘Mr and Mrs Graham came the same day as the Duke and Dss,’ reported Lady Clermont to Lady Spencer; ‘she is a very pretty sort of woman, the Dss likes her of all things; they are inseparable, which is no bad thing. I wish she had half a dozen more such favourites.’21 Mary’s father, Lord Cathcart, was formerly the British envoy to Russia, and she had lived abroad for much of her life. Lady Cathcart had died when Mary was fourteen and she had since been obliged to act as a surrogate mother to her baby sister, Charlotte. Georgiana and Mary were the same age and had married in the same year, but Mary lived a very different, sheltered life. She was quiet, serious and gentle – Georgiana might not have noticed her were it not for her breathtaking