On 3 April Georgiana performed her first official duty for the party. The diarist Silas Neville was enjoying a stroll when he stumbled on the proceedings: ‘[I] was present in the Garden at the re-election of the Arch-Patriot Secretary. The Crowd was immense of carriages and people of all ranks. The Duchess of Devonshire and another lady were on the hustings and waved their hats with the rest in compliment to Charles, who was soon after chaired under a canopy of oak leaves and mirtle amidst the acclamations of thousands.’30 The London Chronicle reported the event in some amazement. In an age of free beer and bloody noses at election time the Whigs’ polished handling of public events was disconcerting. Fox stood on a platform beneath three large banners that read, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE, FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE, and INDEPENDENCE. Shouting above the roaring crowd, Fox thanked them for their confidence and promised he would unite the country in defence of liberty. ‘His friends wore orange and blue ribbons, with the word Fox on them,’ reported the paper.31 Georgiana was there with several other women, all wearing the Whig colours of blue and buff, and they raised their hats each time the crowd huzzahed. Nothing like it had ever been witnessed before. Milliners’ shops began making fans bearing Georgiana’s portrait which sold in their hundreds; Charles Fox and the Prince of Wales also became fashionable subjects: ‘The fans are quite new, and beautiful, designed and executed by the first masters of that art, and are striking likenesses of the exalted characters they represent; the prices are very moderate,’ claimed Hartshorn and Dyde’s of Wigmore Street.32
A week later, on 8 April, the Whigs made their first appearance in the Commons. At first MPs were disorientated: Lord North and his followers were no longer sitting on the treasury benches; in their place were the Whigs. Their uniform of blue and buff was gone and they wore the formal dress of government, all of them – even Fox – with hair powder, ruffles, lace around their necks, and swords by their sides. Lord Nugent had been burgled the night before and his lace ruffles stolen, causing a wag to remark that magistrates would probably find them on the new government.33
Lady Spencer, trapped at home with the ailing Lord Spencer, felt excluded from her children’s lives. The drum beat which accompanied Georgiana’s activities barely sounded in Wimbledon. On 22 May she recalled a recent conversation with the Duchess of Annenberg who had congratulated her on the family’s reputation for being one of the ‘happiest and closest’ in Britain.34 But Georgiana paid no attention to her mother’s hints; for the first time since her wedding in 1774 she looked forward to the future. According to James Hare, she appeared ‘very handsome and seems easier and happier than she used to do’.35
Georgiana’s optimism was born out of a new-found sense of purpose. In September 1782 she recorded her thoughts about the year.
The secret springs of events are seldom known [she wrote]. But when they are, they become particularly instructive and entertaining … the greatest actions have often proceeded from the intrigues of a handsome woman or a fashionable man, and of course whilst the memoires of those events are instructive by opening the secret workings of the human mind, they likewise attract by the interest and events of a novel … If some people would write down the events they had been witness to … the meaning of an age would be transmitted to the next with clearness and dependence – to the idle reader it would present an interesting picture of the manners of his country … I wish I had done this – I came into the world at 17 and I am now five and twenty – in these eight years I have been in the midst of action … I have seen partys rise and fall – friends be united and disunited – the ties of love give way to caprice, to interest, and to vanity …’
She hoped one day to be ‘a faithful historian of the secret history of the times’.36
* To make a baby.
* 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.
*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.
The Duchess of Devonshire, it is said, means to introduce a head piece which is to be neither hat, cap, nor bonnet, and yet all three, a sort of trinity in unity, under the appellation the ‘Devonshire Whim’. Whenever the Duchess of Devonshire visits the capital, a Standard may be expected to be given to the Fashion. At present scarce any innovation is attempted even in the head-dress. This does not arise from the Town being destitute of Women of elegance; many ladies of the first rank being on the spot; but rather proceeds from the dread each feels that the Taste she may endeavour to take the lead in may be rejected.
Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 21 October 1782
As SOON AS parliament adjourned for the summer Georgiana and the Duke retreated to Bath. They did not return to Devonshire House until the autumn, when the new session was well under way. Accompanying them to London was Lady Elizabeth Foster, described by the papers as the ‘Duchess of Devonshire’s intimate friend’.
Georgiana met Elizabeth, or Bess, as she affectionately called her, during their first week at Bath. The Duke had rented the Duke of Marlborough’s house, one of the finest in town, for the whole summer. The Devonshires were both there to ‘take the cure’: the Duke for his gout, Georgiana for her ‘infertility’ – she had suffered two early miscarriages the previous year.1 The tone of her letters betrays her misery at having to abandon London just when the Whigs had come to power. She rarely went out and attended few of the balls and nightly concerts in the Assembly Rooms. Twice a day she drank the thermal waters in the King’s Bath, the most fashionable of the three pump rooms. The company there was hardly uplifting, comprising the unfortunate casualties of eighteenth-century living: the incurables, the rheumatics, the gout sufferers, and those afflicted with rampant eczema and other unsightly skin diseases. Georgiana sat each morning in a semicircle near the bar with the other childless wives, cup and saucer in either hand, listening to a band of provincial musicians. Bath was, in her opinion, ‘amazingly disagreeable, I am only surprised at the Duke bearing it all as well as he does, but he is so good natur’d he bears anything well’.2
Two things made life tolerable: watching the new Shakespearean actress Sarah Siddons at the Theatre Royal, and the acquaintance of two sisters living in straitened circumstances in an unfashionable part of town. On 1 June Georgiana informed Lady Spencer, ‘Lady