Undaunted, Lady Spencer decided they should try Italy. She wrote to her mother in July and asked her to come out to Spa to look after Georgiana while they were away. She admitted that she was leaving Georgiana behind ‘with some difficulty’, but she had always placed her role as a wife before that of motherhood. For Georgiana, already missing her siblings, her mother’s sudden and inexplicable abandonment was a profound shock. ‘Miss Spencer told me today she lov’d me very well but did not like to stay with me without her mama,’ her grandmother recorded in her diary.23 For the next twelve months Georgiana lived in Antwerp with her grandmother, who supervised her education. Believing, perhaps, that her parents had left her behind as a punishment for some unnamed misdeed, Georgiana became acutely self-conscious and anxious to please. She imitated her grandmother’s likes and dislikes, training herself to anticipate the expectations of adults. ‘We are now 38 at table,’ Mrs Poyntz wrote in June 1764, ten months after Georgiana’s parents had left Spa. ‘Miss Spencer is adored by all the company, they are astonished to see a child of her age never ask for anything of the dinner or desert but what I give her.’24
When her daughter and son-in-law returned Mrs Poyntz was amazed at the intensity of Georgiana’s reaction: ‘I never saw a child so overjoy’d, she could hardly speak or eat her dinner.’25 Lady Spencer immediately noticed that there was something different about her daughter but she decided she liked the change. ‘I had the happiness of finding my dear Mother and Sweet girl quite well,’ she wrote to one of her friends; ‘the latter is vastly improved.’26 Although Lady Spencer did not realize it, the improvement was at the cost of Georgiana’s self-confidence. Without the inner resources which normally develop in childhood, she grew up depending far too much on other people. As a child it made her obedient; as an adult it made her susceptible to manipulation.
Three years later, in 1766, a tragedy occurred which had repercussions for the whole family. Lady Spencer had become pregnant with her fourth child and, in the autumn of 1765, gave birth to a daughter named Charlotte. The child symbolized a much needed fresh start after the Spencers’ eighteen-month absence from England, which was perhaps why she engrossed Lady Spencer’s attention just as Georgiana had done nine years before. ‘She is a sweet little poppet,’ she wrote.27 This time Lady Spencer breastfed the baby herself instead of hiring a wet nurse, and persevered even though it hurt and made her ‘low’. Georgiana’s notes to her mother when Lady Spencer was in London suggest that she was more than a little jealous of the new arrival.28 But infant mortality, although improved since the seventeenth century, was still high. Charlotte died shortly after her first birthday.
Lord and Lady Spencer were shattered by the loss. ‘You know the perhaps uncommon tenderness I have for my children,’ Lady Spencer explained to her friend Thea Cowper. Three years later, in 1769, Charlotte was still very much in her heart when she had another daughter, whom they called Louise. But she too died after only a few weeks. After this the Spencers travelled obsessively, sometimes with and sometimes without the children, never spending more than a few months in England at a stretch. Seeking an answer for their ‘heavy affliction’, they turned to religion for comfort and Lady Spencer began to show the first signs of the religious fanaticism which later overshadowed her life.
At night, however, religion was far from their thoughts as they sought distraction in more worldly pursuits. They set up gaming tables at Spencer House and Althorp and played incessantly with their friends until the small hours. Lady Spencer tried to control herself: ‘Played at billiards and bowls and cards all evening and a part of the night,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Enable me O God to persevere in my endeavour to conquer this habit as far as it is a vice,’ she prayed on another occasion.29 The more hours she spent at the gambling table, the more she punished herself with acts of self-denial. By the time Georgiana was old enough to be conscious of her mother’s routine, Lady Spencer had tied herself to a harsh regimen: up at 5.30 every morning, prayers for an hour, the Bible for a further hour, followed by a meagre breakfast at nine, and then household duties and good works until dinner. But in her heart she knew that her actions contained more show than feeling. ‘I know,’ she wrote, ‘that there is a mixture of Vanity and false humility about me that is detestable.’30 However, knowledge of her faults did not change her ways. Twenty years later a friend complained: ‘She is toujours Lady Spencer, Vanity and bragging will not leave her, she lugg’d in by the head and shoulders that she had been at Windsor.’31
The children were silent witnesses to their parents’ troubled life. Sometimes Georgiana and Harriet would creep downstairs to watch the noisy scenes taking place around the gaming table. ‘I staid till one hour past twelve, but mama remained till six next morning,’ Harriet wrote in her diary.32 When the children were older they were allowed to participate. Harriet recorded on a trip to Paris: ‘A man came today to papa to teach him how he might always win at Pharo, and talked of it as a certainty, telling all his rules, and when papa told him he always lost himself, the man assur’d him it was for want of money and patience, for that his secret was infallible. Everybody has given him something to play for them, and papa gave him a louis d’or for my sister and me.’33
Georgiana reacted to the loss of Charlotte and Louise by worrying excessively about her two younger siblings. She also became highly sensitive to criticism and the smallest remonstrance produced hysterical screams and protracted crying. Lady Spencer tried many different experiments to calm Georgiana, forcing her to spend hours in prayer and confining her to her room – to little effect.34 It was in her nature to oversee every aspect of a project, and from this time forward Lady Spencer left nothing in Georgiana’s development to chance. Even her thoughts were subject to scrutiny. ‘Pray sincerely to God,’ Lady Spencer ordered her, ‘that he would for Jesus Christ’s sake give his assistance without which you must not hope to do anything.’35
When she reached adolescence Georgiana’s tendency to over-react became less marked, but not enough to allay her mother’s fear for her future happiness. In November 1769 both George and Harriet were dangerously ill and Lady Spencer confided to a friend that the twelve-year-old Georgiana had shown ‘upon this as upon every other occasion such a charming sensibility that it is impossible not to be pleased with it, tho’ when I reflect upon it I assure you it gives me concern as I know by painful experience how much such a disposition will make her suffer hereafter.’36
Georgiana was only fourteen when people began to speculate on her choice of husband. Lady Spencer thought it would be a dreadful mistake if she married