Still from the film The Duchess and information from the book, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Georgiana, played by Keira Knightley

Georgiana, played by Keira Knightley

Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

Georgiana, played by Keira Knightley‘I know was handsome …. and have always been fashionable, but I do assure you,’ Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, wrote to her daughter at the end of her life, ‘our negligence and ommissions have been forgiven and we have been loved, more from our being free from airs than from any other circumstance. Lacking airs was only part of her charm. She had always fascinated people. According to the retired French diplomat Louis Dutens, who wrote a memoir of English society in the 1780s and 1790s, ‘When she appeared, every eye was turned towards her; when absent, she was the subject of universal conversation.’ Georgiana was not classically pretty, but she was tall, arresting, sexually attractive and extremely stylish. Indeed, the newspapers dubbed her the ‘Empress of Fashion’.

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The famous Gainsborough portrait of Georgiana succeeds in capturing something of the enigmatic charm which her contemporaries found so compelling. However, it is not an accurate depiction of her features: her eyes were heavier, her mouth larger. Georgiana’s son Hart (short for Marquess of Hartington) insisted that no artist every succeeded in painting a true representation of his mother. Her character was too full of contradictions, the spirit which animated her thoughts too quick to be caught in a single expression.

Georgiana Spencer was both at Althorp, outside Northampton, on 7 June 1757, the eldest child of the Earl and Countess Spencer. She was a precocious and affectionate baby and the birth of her brother George, a year later, failed to diminish Lady Spencer’s infatuation with her daughter. Georgiana would always have first place in her heart, she confessed: ‘I will own I feel so partial to my Dear little Gee, that I think I never shall love another so well.’ The arrival of a second daughter, Harriet, in 1761 did not alter Lady Spencer’s feelings. Writing soon after the birth, she dismissed Georgiana’s sister as a ‘little ugly girl’ with ‘no beauty to brag of but an abundance of find brown hair’. The special bond between Georgiana and her mother endured throughout her childhood and beyond. They loved each other with a rare intensity. ‘You are my best and dearest friend,’ Georgiana told her when she was seventeen. ‘You have my heard and may do what you will with it.’ 

The Duke, played by Ralph Fiennes

The Duke, played by Ralph Fiennes

Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

The Duke had had a lonely upbringing which was reflected in his almost pathological reserve. One of his daughters later joked that their only means of communication was through her dog: ‘the whole of tea and again at supper, we talked of no one subject but the puppies …. I quite rejoice at having one in my possession, for it is never a failing method of calling his attention and attracting his notice. However, behind the Duke’s wooden facade was an intelligent and well-educated mind. According to Wraxall, his friends regarded him as an expert on Shakespeare and the classics: ‘On all disputes that occasionally arose amongst the members of the club (Brooks’s) relative to passages of the roman poets or historians, I know that appeal was commonly made to the Duke, and his decision or opinion was regarded as final.’

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The Duke had barely known his mother, Lady Charlotte Boyle, who died when he was six. The fourth Duke had married her against his own mother’s wishes. There was no clear reason for the Duchess’s objection – she called it ‘an accursed match’ – particularly since Lade Charlotte brought a vast fortune to the family, her father, the Earl of Burlington, having no heir. But the Duchess would have nothing more to do with her son; when he died ten years later she made no attempt to see her grandchildren. The fifth Duke, his two brothers Lords Richard and George, and sister Lady Dorothy, were brought up in cold splendour in the care of their Cavendish uncles.

Georgiana’s future husband was only sixteen when he came into an income that was twice Lord Spencer’s; by one account it amounted to more than £60,000 a year. His property included not only the magnificent Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Devonshire House in London, but five other estates of comparable grandeur; Lismore Castle in Ireland, Hardwick House and Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, and Chiswick House and Burlington House in London. He was one of the most sought-after bachelors in London – although Mrs Delaney was mystified as to the reason why. ‘The Duke’s intimate friends say he has sense, and does not want merit,’ she wrote. But in her opinion he was boring and gauche: ‘To be sure the jewel has not been well polished: had he fallen under the tuition of the late Lord Chesterfield he might have possessed les graces, but at present only that of his dukedom belongs to him. As one newspaper delicately put it, ‘His Grace is an amiable and respectable character, but dancing is not his forte.

Superficially, the Duke’s character seemed not unlike Lord Spencer’s; however, behind a shy exterior Georgiana’s father concealed strong feelings. One of his few surviving letters to Georgiana, written after her marriage, bears eloquent witness to his warm heart: ‘But indeed my Dearest Georgiana, I did not know till lately how much I loved you; I miss you every day and every hour. The twenty-four-year-old Duke had no such hidden sweetness, although Georgiana thought he did. Knowing how awkward her father could be in public, she assumed that the Duke masked his true nature from all but his closest confidants.

Charles Grey, played by Dominic Cooper

Charles Grey, played by Dominic Cooper

Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

He was only twenty-three years old, the eldest son of a general from a well connected Northumberland family.  Georgiana had met him before, when he was a schoolboy at Eton, and had visited his parents at Coxheath.  In the intervening period he had grown into a tall, handsome young man with an aristocratic appearance, possessing a high forehead, thick hair, melancholy dark eyes and a long nose.  ‘He has the patrician thoroughbred look …. which I dote upon,’ remarked Lord Byron, when he first saw him.

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Grey delivered his maiden speech in the Commons on 22 February 1787; it was sufficiently eloquent for Sir Gilbert Elliot to praise it as ‘excessively good indeed, and such as has given everybody the highest opinion both of his abilities and character …. he professes not to be of a party but I think he has a warm leaning to us.’  Following her usual practice, Georgiana quickly snatched him up into Whig society, flattering him with invitations to select dinners to meet the party grandees.  For many months she tolerated his attentions with the gentle amusement she reserved for her younger admirers –

Lady Elizabeth Foster, played by Hayley Atwell

Lady Elizabeth Foster, played by Hayley Atwell

Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

Never was a story more proper for a novel than poor Lady Elizabeth Foster’s (wrote Mrs. Dillon). She is parted from her husband, but would you conceive any father with the income he has should talk of her living alone on such a scanty pittance as £300 a year! And this is the man who is ever talking of his love of hospitality and his desire to have his children about him! Might one not imagine that he would be oppos’d to a pretty young woman of her age living alone? It is incredible the cruelties that monster Foster made her undergo with him; her father knows it, owned him a villain, and yet, for fear she should fall on his hands again, tried to persuade her to return to him.

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To compound matters, the Earl managed to ‘forget’ Bess’s allowance whenever it came due.

Mrs. Dillon’s horror at Bess’s situation – respectable but alone and without financial support – was understandable. Fanny Burney wrote The Wanderer to highlight the dreadful vulnerability of such women to pimps and exploitation. Their status demanded that appearances they could not afford shuld be maintained while the means to make an independent living were denied them. Bess’s newly inherited title made it impossible for her to find work either as a governess or a paid companion. She could easily fall for a man who offered her a better life as his mistress, hence Mrs. Dillon’s amazement at Lord Bristol’s lack of concern. Many years later Bess tried to defend her subsequent conduct to her son:

Pray remember, when you say that my enthusiasm has had a fair and well-shaped channel, that I was younger than you when I was without a guide; a wife and no husband, a mother and no children …. by myself alone to steer through every peril that surrounds a young woman so situated; books, the arts, and a wish to be loved and approved …. a proud determination to be my own letter of recommendation …. with perhaps a manner than pleased, realised my projects, and gained me friends wherever I have been.

A wish to be loved and approved, and a manner that pleased: it was an irresistible combination to Georgiana.

Lady Spencer, played by Charlotte Rampling

Lady Spencer, played by Charlotte Rampling

Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

Georgiana’s mother had delicate cheekbones, auburn hair and deep brown eyes which looked almost black against her pale complexion.  The fashion for arranging the hair away from the face suited her perfectly.  It helped to disguise the fact that her eyes bulged slightly, a feature which she passed on to Georgiana.  She was intelligent, exceptionally well read and, unusually for women of her day, she could read and write Greek as well as French and Italian.  A portrait painted by Pompeo Batoni in 1764 shows her surrounded by her interests; in one hand she holds a sheaf of music – she was a keen amateur composer – near the other lies a guitar; there are books on the table and in the background the ruins of ancient Rome, referring to her love of all this classical.  ‘She has so decided a character,’ remarked Lord Bristol, ‘that nothing can warp it’.

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Her father, Stephen Poyntz, had died when she was thirteen, leaving the family in comfortable but not rich circumstances.   He had risen from humble origins – his father was an upholsterer – by making the best of an engaging manner and a brilliant mind.  He began his career as a tutor to the children of Viscount Townshend and ended it a Privy Councillor to King George II.  Accordingly, he brought up his children to be little courtiers like himself: charming, discreet and socially adept in all situations.  Vice was tolerated so long as it was hidden.  ‘I have known the Poyntzes in the nursery,’ Lord Lansdowne remarked contemptuously, ‘the Bible on the table, the cards in the drawer.’

Charles James Fox, played by Simon McBurne

Charles James Fox, played by Simon McBurne

Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

Charles James Fox, her second new acquaintance, made a great impression on Georgiana, not in a romanticway – 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 become friends with him when he came to stay at Chatsworth in 1777. Is 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.

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He was born in 1949, the second of 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.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, played by Aiden McArdle

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, played by Aiden McArdle

Extract from the book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman

At its broadest the Circle numbered more than a hundred people; at its most intimate, thirty. In modern terms they were London’s ‘cafe 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 dishonest.

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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 ….’

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.