Georgiana’s pleasure at her success was short-lived: one day she discovered that the Duke and Lady Jersey had been taking advantage of her parades through the camp to visit each other’s tents. Possibly jealous of the attention Georgiana was receiving and feeling neglected, the Duke made no effort to keep the affair a secret. Lady Jersey went further and flaunted her conquest in front of Georgiana, who was too frightened and inexperienced to assert herself.7 Lady Jersey regarded all married men – except her husband, who was twice her age – as an irresistible challenge. (When a ribald article appeared about her in the Morning Post in 1777 it shocked only Lord Jersey. They happened to be staying at Chatsworth at the time and he embarrassed everyone by announcing that he loved his wife and would ‘shew the world he did not believe them’.)8 Lady Jersey always tormented the wives of her conquests, and fond though she was of Georgiana she couldn’t resist the urge to humiliate her friend. According to Lady Clermont, she ‘asked the Duchess if she could give her a bed [at Coxheath]. She said she was afraid not, the other said, “then I will have a bed in your room.” So that in the house she is to be. Pray, write to the Duchess,’ she asked Lady Spencer, ‘that you hope, in short, I don’t know what …’9
Georgiana’s timidity puzzled her mother – although hurt and mortified it seems that she said nothing to either party. For once Lady Spencer showed a certain sensitivity and, instead of remonstrating with her daughter, made an unaccustomed effort to praise her and boost her confidence. ‘Your behaviour is in every respect just what it ought to be,’ she wrote in July, referring to Georgiana’s visit to nearby Tunbridge Wells. A local newspaper had reported that the townspeople felt snubbed by the grandees at Coxheath, so Georgiana attended the Assembly Rooms with Lady Clermont and Mrs Crewe, where the master of ceremonies welcomed them to much applause. ‘I believe it with great reason,’ Lady Spencer continued, ‘that if you continue as you have begun you will gain the love and admiration of all who see you.’*12
It was not long, however, before the chiding resumed: ‘I suspect’, she complained in August, ‘you put on … a great deal more familiarity and ease than is necessary or proper to the men about you.’13 As usual, Lady Spencer’s criticisms were not without cause. ‘I believe the Dss of D one of the most amiable beings in the world,’ Mrs Montagu wrote after meeting her at Tunbridge Wells. ‘She has a form and face extremely angelick, her temper is perfectly sweet, she has fine parts, the greatest purity of heart and innocence possible.’ But, Mrs Montagu added, ‘as goodness thinks no ill where no ill seems, she does not keep so far aloof from the giddy and imprudent part of the World as one could wish.’14
The liaison between Lady Jersey and the Duke was shortlived. Fortunately for Georgiana, Lady Spencer ordered an end to the affair. Angered by Georgiana’s unwillingness to interfere, she had called on Lady Jersey and outlined the consequences she would face if it continued.11 The Spencers also gave the Duke to understand that they were disgusted with him.
By the time the King and Queen made their long-awaited official visit to Coxheath on 4 November 1778, Lady Jersey had acquired a new lover. The rain poured down on the day – ‘cats and dogs,’ Georgiana complained – and while the Duke marched his soldiers past the King, Georgiana led the delegation of ladies standing in slippery mud up to their ankles waiting on the Queen. Georgiana’s discomfort was greatly increased by the onset of what she termed ‘the Prince’, a common euphemism for menstruation. Although the rain prevented many of the planned manoeuvres from taking place, the newspapers considered the visit a success. According to Georgiana, the Duke of Devonshire was ‘reckon’d to have saluted the best of anybody’.10 However, the Devonshires’ patriotism did not extend to spending the winter in a mud pit; immediately after the royal visit they returned to Devonshire House.
Georgiana’s sense of isolation had increased as a result of the Duke’s adultery. Her ebullience became a screen which she employed to distance herself from people. She did not mind public occasions, but quiet tête-à-têtes made her uncomfortable and she tried to avoid them, though not always with success. Her reluctance to give offence made her incapable of declining an invitation. ‘I am to dine with Lady Jersey,’ Georgiana wrote to Lady Spencer a few months later. ‘To tell you the truth tho’ I love her tenderly, I have learnt to feel a kind of uneasiness in being with her, that makes our society very general – I am discontented in being with her and can’t tell her so, et ma bonhomie en souffre.’15* Despite her unease, she continued to behave towards Lady Jersey as if nothing had happened.
Other inhabitants of the camp were less fortunate than Lady Jersey – not all escaped the consequences of their actions so lightly. Lady Melbourne became pregnant with Lord Egremont’s child while Lady Clermont’s affair with the local apothecary resulted in a secret abortion. But it was Lady Derby and the Duke of Dorset who, in social terms, paid the highest price.16 Lady Mary Coke saw them together in June and rued Lady Derby’s recklessness. She wrote in her diary: ‘Lady Derby, like the Duchess of Devonshire, has bad connexions which lead her into many things that she had better not do, and for which I am sorry …’17 Her intuition proved correct. In December 1778 Lady Derby fled from her husband’s house, leaving behind her children and all her belongings. It was a widely broadcast secret that she was hiding with the Duke of Dorset. Her desertion broke one of eighteenth-century society’s strongest taboos regarding the sanctity of the family and a wife’s obedience to her husband. According to Lady Mary Coke, she had ‘offended against the laws of man and God’.18 She heard that Lady Derby’s brother the Duke of Hamilton was trying to force the Duke of Dorset to sign a legal document agreeing to marry her as soon as the divorce came through. There were other rumours: Lady Derby was pregnant; the Duke of Dorset had made another mistress pregnant; he was now in love with someone else. In February, two months after the initial excitement, Lady Sarah Lennox had this to say to her sister:
It is imagined the Duke of Dorset will marry Lady Derby, who is now in the country keeping quiet and out of the way. There is a sort of party in town of who is to visit her and who is not, which makes great squabbles, as if the curse or blessing of the poor woman depended on a few tickets more or less … I am told she has been and still is more thoroughly attached to the Duke of Dorset, and if so I suppose she will be very happy if the lessening of her visiting list is the only misfortune, and what with giving up her children, sorrow for a fault, and dread of not preserving his affections, I think she is much to be pittied.19
The ‘party’ who went to visit her consisted mostly of the younger generation of Whigs – Lady Carlisle and Lady Jersey in particular. Georgiana was caught between her friends, who sought the additional weight of her celebrity, and her parents, who forbade her to have anything more to do with the unfortunate woman. Everyone was waiting to see what Georgiana would do, said Lady Mary Coke, ‘lest such bad company should influence