Читать книгу The Duchess - Amanda Foreman - Страница 9

Gaming among the females at Chatsworth has been carried to such a pitch that the phlegmatic Duke has been provoked to express at it and he has spoken to the Duchess in the severest terms against a conduct which has driven many from the house who could not afford to partake of amusements carried on at the expense of £500 or £1000 a night.

Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Wednesday 4 September 1776

As you are the loveliest and best tempered woman in his Majesty’s dominions, learn to be the most prudent and wise. If you do, your dominion will be universal, and you will have nothing to lament, but that you have no more worlds to conquer.

Editorial addressed to Georgiana, Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, 4 July 1777

‘COMING HERE has made a strong impression on me,’ Georgiana wrote during a visit to the Devonshires’ Londesborough estate in October 1776. ‘Alas,’ she continued, ‘I can’t help but make an unhappy comparison between the emotions I experienced two years ago during my first visit, and what I feel now.’¹ She was suffering from a profound sense of disillusionment, not only with her marriage but also with fashionable life.

For those who could moderate their pursuit of pleasure, Whig society was sophisticated, tolerant and cosmopolitan. Whigs prided themselves on their patronage of the arts as much as they venerated their contribution to statecraft. They were the oligarchs of taste, proselytizers of their superior cultivation. But the ton, by definition, inhabited the realm of the extreme. Moderation was not a part of its world: elegance bowed to artifice, pleasure gave way to excess. ‘You must expect to be class’d with the company you keep,’ was Lady Spencer’s constant warning to Georgiana.² Embarrassed by her own previous association with the ton, Lady Spencer nursed a visceral dislike towards its members. She regarded it as a magnet for the least respectable elements of her class, and Georgiana’s friends as the worst among the bad.

The people who gathered around Georgiana and the Duke shared an attachment to the Whig party, a worldly attitude, a passion for the theatre and a love of scandal. Fashion was the only ‘career’ open to aristocratic women; politics the only ‘trade’ that a man of rank might pursue. Georgiana’s friends engaged in both regardless of their sex. Women aspired to be political hostesses of note, men to be arbiters of taste. Their collective ambition and competitiveness made them distinct even within the ton, and it was not long before society labelled the habitués of Devonshire House the ‘Devonshire House Circle’. All Whigs were welcome, of course, but the older, staider members felt ill at ease among the more rakish elements. Edmund Burke, then approaching the height of his influence within the party as its philosopher and propagandist, almost never went except to accompany his patron, the Marquess of Rockingham. Devonshire House was too frivolous and louche for him, and its casual attitude towards sexual misconduct made the middle-class Irishman uncomfortable. Some of the men took a delight in being overtly crude, as the following wager illustrates: ‘Ld Cholmondeley has given two guineas to Ld Derby, to receive 500 Gs. whenever his lordship fucks a woman in a Balloon one thousand yards from Earth.’³

Those who embraced the Circle maintained a lofty disdain for the world outside.^* Serious Devonshire House acolytes identified themselves by their imitation of the Cavendish drawl. By now Georgiana never spoke in any other way and the more it became one of her personal mannerisms, the more compelling it was to her admirers. What began as playful mimicry evolved with popular usage into a kind of dialect, called the ‘Devonshire House Drawl’. It has been characterized as part baby-talk, part refined affectation: hope was written and pronounced as ‘whop’; you became ‘oo’. Vowels were compressed and extended so that cucumber became ‘cowcumber’, yellow ‘yaller’, gold ‘goold’, and spoil rhymed with mile. Stresses fell on unexpected syllables, such as bal-cony instead of bal-cony and con-template.⁴ By the middle of the next century all Whigs would speak in the Drawl, transforming a family tradition into a symbol of political allegiance, but in Georgiana’s time it remained the Circle’s own patois. Lord Pelham was moved to warn a friend: ‘I hope you will love the Dss and forgive some of her peculiarities – but above all do not adopt their manners … I have never known anybody that has lived much with them without catching something of their manner.’⁵

At its broadest the Circle numbered more than a hundred people; at its most intimate, thirty. In modern terms they were London’s ‘café society’: the racier members of the aristocracy mixed with professional artists and actors, scroungers, libertines and wits. The playwright and arch-scrounger Richard Brinsley Sheridan was one of its stars. An incorrigible drinker, womanizer and plotter, he embodied the best and worst of the Circle. He was brilliant yet lazy, kind-hearted and yet remiss over honouring his debts to the point of dishonesty. Sheridan disliked paying his creditors on the grounds that ‘paying only encourages them’. He once shook his head at the sight of a friend settling his account, saying, ‘What a waste …’⁶ He was introduced to Georgiana through his wife, the beautiful and talented singer Elizabeth Linley. Then at the pinnacle of her career, Elizabeth consented to perform at Devonshire House so long as she could be accompanied by her husband. Sheridan’s sole success at the time, The Rivals, did not gain him an invitation on his own account. Notwithstanding his inauspicious introduction as Elizabeth’s escort, Sheridan worked feverishly to ingratiate himself into the Circle. He made it his business to be entertaining, to be useful, to know every secret and to have a hand in every intrigue. Having secured his place, he encouraged his wife to relinquish her career and only the very fortunate heard her sing again.^*

David Garrick was another celebrated theatrical member of the Circle. After watching him give a pre-supper performance, Georgiana wrote: ‘I have no terms to express the horror of Mr Garrick’s reading Macbeth. I have not recovered yet, it is the finest and most dreadful thing I ever saw or heard, for his action and countenance is as expressive and terrible as his voice. It froze my blood as I heard him …’⁷ Second to Garrick in celebrity was the sculptress Mrs Damer, whose heads of Father Thames and the goddess Isis still adorn Henley Bridge. Rumour hinted that she had lesbian tendencies although there was a more obvious explanation for the failure of her marriage: the Hon. John Damer was a pathetic drunk and gamester. In August 1775 he shot himself through the head in a room above the Bedford Arms at Covent Garden after having ruined them both in a single night.

The Craufurd brothers – the francophile James, known as ‘Fish’ because he could be extraordinarily selfish, and Quentin, known as ‘Flesh’ – were renowned connoisseurs of art whose presence lent an intellectual quality to Devonshire House suppers. Their conversational skill was matched by the famous wit James Hare, Georgiana’s particular favourite. ‘He has a manner of placing every object in so new a light,’ she explained to her mother, ‘that his kind of wit always surprises as much as it pleases.’^*8 Hare was also discreet and trustworthy – rare attributes, Georgiana discovered, in the Devonshire House world. Even the ‘mere’ politicians of the Circle were celebrated for their other achievements, like the playwright and satirist General Richard Fitzpatrick, who wrote the enormously successful Rolliad. Georgiana also felt a special affection for the Whig politician and bibliophile Thomas Grenville, who reputedly never married because of his hopeless love for her. These conquerors of the drawing room were joined by such sportsmen as the Duke of Dorset who, when he was not making a reputation for himself as the debaucher of other men’s wives, transformed cricket into the national game. The Earl of Derby, whose wife was one of Dorset’s conquests, and Lord Clermont promoted British horse racing with the establishment of the Oaks and the Derby.

The women, who were no less extraordinary, divided into those who were received by polite society and those who were not. The socially proscribed women included Georgiana’s cousin Lady Diana Spencer, who had committed adultery with Topham Beauclerk in order to provoke her violent husband Lord Bolingbroke into divorcing her. Although an outcast in society, Lady Diana enjoyed equal status at Devonshire House with the ‘beauties’ and celebrated hostesses. Among these were Lady Clermont, a great favourite at Versailles, Lady Derby, who had once hoped to marry the Duke of Devonshire, and Lady Jersey, who used her ‘irresistible seduction and fascination’ to wreck the marriages of her friends. According to a contemporary, she was ‘clever, unprincipled, but beautiful and fascinating’.⁹ Mrs Bouverie, whom Reynolds painted to much acclaim, and the conversationalist Mrs Crewe completed the inner group of respectable women. They were highly competitive and spent much of their time putting one another down. Although greatly respected by her politician friends, and a confidante of Edmund Burke, Mrs Crewe was dismissed by Lady Douglas as ‘very fat with a considerable quantity of visible down about her mouth … her ideas came so quick that [Lady Douglas] could not follow them, nor she believed Mrs Crewe herself’.

Lady Spencer had mixed feelings about the female members of the Circle, but she loathed one woman in particular: Lady Melbourne. Beautiful, clever and ruthless, Lady Melbourne epitomized the decadence of Georgiana’s friends. The incurable gossip Lord Glenbervie recorded in his diary, ‘it was a very general report and belief that … Lord Coleraine sold Lady Melbourne to Lord Egremont for £13,000, that both Lady and Lord Melbourne were parties to this contract and had each a share of the money.’¹⁰ The story might even have been true. Lord Melbourne was an enigma, a silent figure in the drawing room whom visitors to Melbourne House barely noticed. Once Lady Melbourne had presented him with an heir he allowed her the freedom to do and see whom she pleased. He also profited by it. She was not a woman to give her affections indiscriminately. Through her efforts Lord Melbourne was made a viscount in 1781, and later a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in the Prince of Wales’s household. Two of her five children were the offspring of Lord Egremont; another, George, the result of her affair with the Prince of Wales. Only the eldest and possibly the youngest were Lord Melbourne’s.

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 beauty: she was known as ‘the beautiful Mrs Graham’. Gainsborough painted her portrait at least four times in an attempt to capture the serenity of her features.

The obvious mutual attachment between the two women was remarked upon at Brighton, although Georgiana made light of it to Lady Spencer. ‘I live very much with Mrs Graham,’ she wrote en passant. ‘I think her extremely amiable and we like him too very much – but Lady Sefton does not approve of it as I suppose she expected I should live entirely with her.’²² However, the letters Georgiana wrote to Mary after they had left Brighton show that their feelings for each other had grown into infatuation. The first surviving letter of Georgiana’s is a response to a reproach from Mary for not writing more often. Georgiana was staying at Althorp with Lady Spencer, who regarded the interlude as her chance to initiate some remedial training. She kept a tight rein on her daughter, insisting that she imitate her own daily regimen of early morning walks, hours of improving literature, and endless fussing about the servants. The unaccustomed harshness of the regime so exhausted Georgiana that she was too tired to keep up the promised letter-journal to Mary.

I cannot bear the thought of your thinking me negligent [she replied in anguish after receiving a furious letter from Mary] I have had scarce any opportunity lately – and besides I have been very busy – in the first place with writing the verses to my Father on his birthday and with the picture – (As soon as I have time to write them out I will send them to you) and then, I have been working very hard for Mama to compose her some reflections to read to the servants on their taking the Sacrament. Would you believe me capable of so serious a work? My dear friend, despite my giddiness I am capable of thought sometimes. You would not think from appearances that I am able to have deep friendships, but, nevertheless you must know how tenderly I love you. It is the same with other things. I am full of madness but I also have a little sense. I perceive I am eulogising myself, but that is characteristic of a bad heart and I have often told you mine is bad … I am falling asleep and must leave you now, but I want to say to you above all that I love you, my dear friend, and kiss you tenderly.²³

By the spring of 1778 it was Lady Spencer’s turn to complain that Georgiana’s letters had slowed to a trickle.²⁴ Not only did Georgiana spend all her free time writing to Mary; no other subject interested her: ‘I made Mr James set by me at supper last night to have the pleasure of talking about you – it is so deliciously sweet for me, my adorable friend, to speak constantly of you – as I am continuously thinking of you it is a subject that I am very well prepared for … I went to see Lady Anne and Lady Margaret, they both talk a great deal about you and my heart applauds their good taste – I have seen your picture too at Gainsborough’s.’²⁵

Both of them were frightened that the intensity of their friendship would become the subject of gossip. It was almost impossible to keep such things hidden. Maids and footmen were not above reading their employers’ mail, and there was always the danger of letters going astray or falling into the wrong hands. In one fragment Georgiana wrote: ‘I have been reading over this curious letter and I am almost sorry I put so much about what vex’d me when I began writing, I must tell you I am quite easy about it now and if I was sure you would get this letter safe, I would tell you all about it – but I don’t dare.’²⁶ Despite the risk of exposure, she urged Mary to accept a small drawing of herself: ‘You desire me to give you my opinion about the picture, I can not see why you should not have it, I understand what you mean, but I don’t think it would appear odd – consider that in a little time we shall be old friends – however I think I can send you a drawing when I go to town which will not have any of the inconveniences you thought of as you need not shew it – for I shall like you to have something like me.’²⁷

Whether or not Mary actually received the picture is not known. Almost nothing else survives from their lengthy correspondence except a couple of later fragments. Discouraged by the Duke’s freezing civility, Georgiana longed for the tenderness, companionship and affection she experienced with Mary – and also something else, equally if not more important: relief from having to perform for her relatives or the ton. Lady Spencer, her friends, the Duke and his family all placed expectations on her, often forcing her to play roles which made her feel uncomfortable or inadequate. Only with Mary could Georgiana unburden herself and talk about her confusion and dismay.

The hurry I live here distracts me [she wrote in 1778], when I first came into the world the novelty of the scene made me like everything but my heart now feels only an emptiness in the beau monde which cannot be filled – I don’t have the liberty to think or occupy myself with the things I like as much as I would wish and all my desires are turned upside down – you are the only person to whom I would say this, anybody else would only laugh at me and call it an affectation – I seem to enjoy every thing so much at the minute that nobody can think how much I am tired sometimes with the dissipation I live in.²⁸

Georgiana’s sense of unease about her life of dissipation was turning to disgust but, as she remarked sadly, her friends would only laugh if she tried to explain herself. Her intimacy with Mary helped her to gain a perspective on her situation, particularly on the limitations of her marriage. It was unthinkable, however, for a woman to take a lover before she had supplied her husband with a son. Convention allowed aristocratic women a cicisbeo – a term borrowed from the Italian to mean a platonic lover who provided escort duties and other practical services in place of the husband. In The School for Scandal Lady Teazle says she will admit the wicked Joseph Surface ‘as a lover no farther than fashion sanctions’. ‘True,’ he replies, ‘a mere Platonic cicisbeo – what every wife is entitled to.’²⁹ But, despite a large crowd of suitors eager to comply, Georgiana was the exception in lacking even this.³⁰ In 1779 her cousin Lady Pembroke remarked to Lord Herbert: ‘You wrote some time ago terrible things you had heard about the poor Dss of Devonshire, which made me laugh, they were so totally without foundation, and I forgot to answer it. She has never been even talked for any body in the flirting way yet …’³¹

Whether and to what extent physical intimacy played a part in Georgiana’s relationship with Mary is impossible to determine. Several of her friendships contained an element of flirtatiousness: it was a French habit she had acquired from Madame de Polignac and Marie Antoinette. Since the publication of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s enormously successful Julie ou La nouvelle Héloïse French women had self-consciously imitated the loving friendship between Julie and Claire. However, there were rumours that Marie Antoinette and the Little Po were more than simply friends, which their displays of physical affection encouraged.^32*

Rousseau made a deep impression on Georgiana, and her own copy of La nouvelle Héloïse at Chatsworth is scored with her markings.³³ She lived on a plane of heightened feeling which her English friends found alluring but also disturbing. ‘Some part of your letter frightened me,’ Lady Jersey once wrote, not altogether sure how to interpret Georgiana’s declarations of love.³⁴ Georgiana’s passionate imprecations went far beyond the ordinary endearments written between women friends, ‘Je t’aime mon coeur bien tendrement, indeed, indeed, indeed, I love you dearly’ is one of her typical messages to Lady Melbourne.³⁵ However, even taking hyperbole into account, Georgiana’s letters to Mary were more personal, more intense, clearly separating them from her other correspondence. Georgiana was seeking her Claire, who would know her every thought, be at her side during the day, share her bed at night, and hold her in her arms when she died. But it was not to be. In 1781 the doctors ordered Mr Graham to take Mary to a warmer climate: it was the only hope for her weak lungs. They had diagnosed her as consumptive. Georgiana was bereft and searched without success for a replacement.

Charles James Fox, her second new acquaintance, made a great impression on Georgiana, not in a romantic way – that would emerge later – but intellectually. It was Fox, more than anyone else, who led Georgiana to her life’s vocation – politics. Fox was a brilliant though flawed politician. Short and corpulent, with shaggy eyebrows and a permanent five o’clock shadow, he was already at twenty-eight marked down as a future leader of the Whig party when the Marquess of Rockingham retired. Georgiana became friends with him when he came to stay at Chatsworth in 1777. His career until then had veered between political success and failure, between unimaginable wealth and bankruptcy. He confounded his critics with his irrepressible confidence, and exasperated his friends by his incontinent lifestyle. Eighteenth-century England was full of wits, connoisseurs, orators, historians, drinkers, gamblers, rakes and pranksters, but only Fox embodied all these things.

He was born in 1749, the second of the three surviving sons of the Whig politician Henry Fox, first Baron Holland, and Lady Caroline Lennox, daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. Although an unscrupulous and – even for the age – corrupt politician, Lord Holland was a tender husband and an indulgent father who shamelessly spoilt his children. No eighteenth-century upbringing has received more attention or encountered such criticism as Fox’s. By contemporary social standards the Holland household was a kind of freak show. There were stories of Fox casually burning his father’s carefully prepared speeches, smashing his gold watch to see how it would look broken, disrupting his dinners – and never being punished.

Having enjoyed such an unrestricted existence, both materially and emotionally, Fox was similarly open and generous with his friends. He was incapable of small-mindedness or petty ambition. It was this, coupled with his natural talent for leadership, which won him instant popularity at Eton and enduring friendships throughout his life. Before he joined the Whig party Fox seemed to have no ambition except pleasure and no political loyalties except to his father’s reputation. This he vigorously defended in parliament against charges that, as Paymaster-General during the Seven Years War, Lord Holland had embezzled the country out of millions. No one could deny that the family had become unaccountably rich during this period. However, after his father’s death in 1774 Fox did his best to return the fortune to the nation by gambling it away at Newmarket and Brooks’s.

Lord Holland’s last act before he died had been to pay off his son’s £140,000 debt,³⁶ but this generous gift had no effect on Fox’s behaviour. He stayed up night after night, fighting his body’s urge to sleep with coffee and platefuls of food. According to one anecdote, he played hazard continuously from Tuesday to Wednesday night, winning, losing, recovering and finally losing all his money. He stopped on Thursday to rush to the House of Commons to participate in a debate on the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and went straight back to White’s afterwards. There he drank until Friday morning, when he walked to Almack’s and gambled until 4 p.m. Having won £6,000 he rode to Newmarket, where he lost £10,000.³⁷ Though he very quickly frittered everything away, Fox could always count on friends like the Duke to support him financially and politically.^* Occasionally he won money but he avoided games of skill, which he was very good at, for the excitement of games of chance. He spent so many hours at Brooks’s that he was rarely out of his gambling clothes.^†

Fox displayed a sense of fun and theatre that equalled Georgiana’s. The term ‘macaroni’ was coined to describe the fashionable young fops of the 1770s who wore exaggerated clothes about town. The term probably originated in the 1760s, when members of the short-lived Macaroni Club brought attention to themselves by their predilection for all things foreign, especially food. Macaronis were much criticized in the press. The Oxford Magazine complained: ‘There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’³⁸ Until his gambling debts made him poor, Fox was one of its most visible exemplars. Like Georgiana, he had an eye for colour and a talent for whimsy. The macaroni uniform strove for a super-slim elegance with narrow breeches and short, tight-fitting waistcoats. The flourish was in the finishes: large buttons and extravagant nosegays were essential; high-heeled shoes and a small hat perched on the side of the head added a certain flair. Fox’s particular contribution was to experiment with hair colour, powdering his hair blue one day, red the next. He wore multi-coloured shoes and velvet frills, a daring combination which challenged the fainthearted to follow him.

He went to stay at Chatsworth in August 1777, joining a large house party that included the Jerseys, the Clermonts, the Duke of Dorset, all the Cavendishes as well as their cousins the Ponsonbys, and the violinist Giardini. The week before his arrival Georgiana had written of her alarm and distress ‘at my own dispositions’. But she hid her feelings from her guests and no one noticed that her liveliness was as much a performance as the after-dinner entertainments.

Fox’s presence wrought an immediate change in Georgiana; he intrigued and stimulated her. For the first time since her initial attempts to educate herself two years before, she had found someone to emulate.

The great merit of C. Fox is his amazing quickness in seazing any subject’ [she wrote to her mother in August]. He seems to have the particular talent of knowing more about what he is saying and with less pains than anyone else. His conversation is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff puff – and what makes him more entertaining now is his being here with Mr Townsend and the D. of Devonshire, for their living so much together makes them show off to one another. Their chief topic is Politics and Shakespear. As for the latter they all three seem to have the most astonishing memorys for it, and I suppose I shall be able in time to go thro’ a play as they do …³⁹

In her next letter Georgiana informed her mother that she was reading Vertot’s Revolutions of Sweden. ‘I think it is the most interesting book in the world, I really was quite agitated with my anxiety for Gustavas Vasa,’ she wrote. ‘Especially at seeing a generous and open hearted Hero fighting for the liberty of his country and to revenge the memory of an injur’d friend against lawless cruelty and oppressive tyranny.’⁴⁰ This was the Whig political creed in a single line: the hero fighting for liberty against lawless cruelty and oppressive tyranny. In practical terms for the Rockingham Whig party of the 1770s it meant opposition to George III, a mistrust of the powers of the crown and a vigilance over civil liberties. Fox had probably suggested Vertot to Georgiana. He had only lately converted to Whiggism, having served as a junior minister in the treasury until his outrageous behaviour and erratic support drove George III and Lord North to remove him. ‘Indeed,’ the King wrote in disgust, ‘that young man has so thoroughly cast off every principle of common honour and honesty that he must become as contemptible as he is odious.’⁴¹ After his dismissal Fox became the protégé of Edmund Burke and under his tutelage recast his political ideas. The politician who once declared ‘[I] will not be a rebel to my King, my country or my own heart, for the loudest huzza of the inconsiderate multitude’ now claimed that the King ‘held nothing but what he held in trust for the people, for their use and benefit’.⁴²

Fox’s ardour moved Georgiana. He talked to her as no one else did, treating her as his equal, discussing his ideas and encouraging her participation. She had once visited the House of Commons out of curiosity with Lady Jersey (women were banned from the gallery in 1778), but had not repeated the experiment. Fox awakened in her a sense of loyalty and commitment to the Whig party. By the time he left Chatsworth she was his devoted follower. Twenty years later she was still his most loyal supporter. ‘Charles always had faults,’ was all she would concede, ‘that may injure him and have as a Statesman – but never as the greatest of men.’⁴³ Like his contemporaries at Eton and later at Brooks’s she had fallen under Fox’s spell. His following in parliament depended as much on his personality as on his views. To be a Foxite meant that one belonged to a gang whose single bond was an uncritical admiration of Fox.

Fox and Mary’s belief in Georgiana persuaded her that she could make something more of herself. In April 1778 she wrote of her desire to begin afresh. ‘I have the strongest sense of having many things to repent of and my heart is fully determined to mend,’ she told Lady Spencer; she planned to take Holy Communion (a rite less commonly performed in the eighteenth century) after her trip to Derby. But the same letter also hints at entanglements – gambling debts – which she regretted and feared. ‘By going there I break off many unpleasant embarrassments I am in with regard to others and the quiet life I shall lead there will give me time to think …’⁴⁴

The result was a thinly disguised autobiographical novel called The Sylph. Notwithstanding its exaggerations, the book can be read as a roman à clef. Written as a series of letters, the story follows the misadventures of Julia Stanley, a naive country girl married to the dissipated Sir William Stanley, a rake whose only interests are fashion and gambling. When Julia first comes to London she does not understand the ways of the ton, but slowly it seduces her and she becomes trapped. She learns how to live à la mode, how to spend hours dressing for a ball, how to talk, sing, dance and think like a fashionable person. She realizes that her soul is being corrupted by the cynicism and heartlessness which pervades the ton, but sees no hope of escape. Sir William is cruel, even brutal towards her. His only concern is that she should be a credit to him in public. He flaunts his mistress in front of her, punishes her when she suffers a miscarriage, and is not above assaulting her when angered. As his creditors close in, Sir William forces Julia to sign over all her personal property. (Nor is she the only woman in the book to suffer from male abuse. An aristocratic lady who loses a fortune at the gaming table is blackmailed by a friend into sleeping with him in return for his silence.)^* Julia’s friend Lady Besford, who is obviously modelled on Lady Melbourne, urges her to accept her life and find happiness where she can. Julia is facing moral ruin when an anonymous protector, calling himself ‘the Sylph’, begins sending her letters of advice. Finally Sir William becomes so desperate for money that he sells the rights to Julia’s body to his chief creditor. She runs away, and he shoots himself in a shabby room above an inn.^† The Sylph then reveals himself to be Julia’s childhood sweetheart. They marry and live happily ever after.

Georgiana wrote The Sylph in secret and published it anonymously as ‘a young lady’.⁴⁵ The novel was a creditable success, quickly going through four editions; it was not long before people guessed the identity of the author. When challenged in public Georgiana refused to comment, but it became common knowledge that she had admitted the truth in private. There were plenty of clues pointing in her direction, not only in her choice of names, which are all variations on those of her friends, but in the sly references to herself: Julia’s hairdresser protests that ‘he had run the risk of disobliging the Duchess of D—, by giving me the preference of the finest bunch of radishes that had yet come over from Paris’. Like Georgiana, Julia has a younger sister whom she adores and a worldly, older female companion to whom she turns for advice. The similarities in style and phrasing between the novel and Georgiana’s letters allayed any lingering doubts. Georgiana often wrote of her longing for a moral guide: ‘Few can boast like me of having such a friend and finding her in a mother,’ she once wrote to Lady Spencer, adding how much she depended on her for moral and spiritual advice. ‘I should be very happy if I could borrow some friendly Sylph (if any are so kind as to hover about Hardwick) and a pair of wings that I might Pay you now and then a visit.’⁴⁶

Part of The Sylph’s success was due to its notoriety. Readers were shocked by the sexual licence and violence it depicted. The Gentleman’s Magazine was appalled: the anonymous female author, it thought, showed ‘too great a knowledge of the ton, and of the worst, though perhaps highest part of the world’. Mrs Thrale, doyenne of the Blue Stocking Circle, denounced the book as ‘an obscene Novel’.⁴⁷ She objected to passages such as the following, where Lady Besford expresses a breathtakingly cynical view of marriage:

you do not suppose my happiness proceeds from my being married, any further than that I enjoy title, rank and liberty, by bearing Lord Besford’s name. We do not disagree because we seldom meet. He pursues his pleasure one way, I seek mine another, and our dispositions being opposite, they are sure never to interfere with each other … My Lord kept a mistress from the moment of his marriage. What law excludes a woman from doing the same? Marriage now is a necessary kind of barter, and an alliance of families; – the heart is not consulted …

The Sylph touches on many subjects, not least the loneliness of a bad marriage and the vulnerability of women in a society where they are deprived of equal rights. Georgiana obviously wrote the novel in a hurry and it does not compare well with Fanny Burney’s Evelina, for example. The significance of The Sylph lies in the rare insider’s glimpse it provides of the ton. Georgiana describes a competitive, unfriendly world peopled predominantly by opportunists, liars and bullies; a world which encourages hypocrisy and values pretence. The irony did not escape her that even as she hated it she was also its creature. However, in publishing The Sylph she was also claiming her independence.

*Georgiana was not herself a snob. When Monsieur Tessier, the celebrated French actor, visited England the Duchess of Manchester refused to speak to him because he earned his living. Her behaviour disgusted Georgiana, and to make the point she danced with him at Almack’s.

* Sheridan’s friend and biographer Thomas Moore remembered his hatred of perceived rivals: ‘It was Burke chiefly that S. hated and envied (they indeed hated each other) – Being both Irishmen – both adventurers – they had every possible incentive to envy.’ Wilfrid S. Dowden, ed., The Journal of Thomas Moore (London 1983), I, p. 161.

* Hare’s seat in parliament – courtesy of the Duke – was the only barrier between him and debtors’ prison. He was fortunate enough to be the grandson of a bishop, but also unfortunate in being the son of an apothecary. He had gambled away his small inheritance and thereafter survived as a permanent house guest in Whig society. He was stick thin, with a face so white he appeared more dead than alive.

* Apparently the Queen’s brother-in-law surprised them one day while they were making up after an argument, hugging each other tightly and kissing each other’s tear-stained cheeks. He burst out laughing and left, saying, ‘Pray don’t let me disturb you!’ and told everybody how he had interrupted the two friends.

* Fox even brought a few of his friends to near bankruptcy by persuading them to provide security for him in the form of annuities to money-lenders. At one point the Earl of Carlisle was paying one sixth of his income towards the interest on Fox’s debts. Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford 1991), p. 102.

† Contemporary descriptions show how peculiar this uniform was: ‘The gamesters began by pulling off their embroidered clothes, and putting on frieze greatcoats, or turned their coats inside outwards for good luck. They put on pieces of leather (such as are worn by footmen when they clean knives) to save their laced ruffles; to shield their eyes from the light and hold up curls, etc., they wore high-crowned straw hats with broad brims, adorned with flowers and ribbons: [and] masks to conceal their emotions when they played at quinze.’ J. Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London (London 1872), p. 72.

* When he wrote his memoirs in 1801 Colonel George Hanger, a former lover of Lady Melbourne’s, claimed that several ladies in the Devonshire House Circle had fallen into the same trap.

†In circumstances very similar to the suicide of Mrs Damer’s husband in 1775.