I'm so delighted to be a guest of
the ICAA and particularly to have the opportunity to talk about
Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. Strong, contradictory,
fascinating, difficult women has been my speciality for a while now. And indeed I have just come back from
England where I curated this year's exhibition at Buckingham Palace
called Queen Victoria's palace. Another strong, difficult
but fascinating woman. What Victoria has, I believe, in common with Georgiana as you will see, is this never ending battle to be herself too, to be her authentic self, which of course isn't
necessarily something that
Georgiana would have recognized as a problem in the 18th century. What you see on the screen
before you is Chatsworth. And of course the thing that will strike
you immediately is the sense of order, the proportions, the
windows, the decorations, everything is so beautifully ordered. But when we pull back the
layers of 18th century society, particularly late 18th century society, what you see is anything
but order. In fact, you see a great deal of chaos and what
makes these people's lives interesting, I think to us is the struggle to make
sense of why their lives are in chaos when they are surrounded by
some of the most beautiful neoclassical architecture, the most
wonderful Georgian art, the most mind blowing Georgian landscape.
And on the outside, everything is about beauty, about proportion, about the sublime, and yet it's not on the inside. So this rather wonderful
painting by Angelica Kauffman, which is one of my favorite paintings, depicts Georgiana with her two younger
siblings just before she was married. So she is the one in the white
dress looking directly at you. And then next to her is Henrietta, her sister with whom she
was incredibly close. And then her younger brother
George. Notice the red hair, the Spencer red hair that's so
apparent on George [inaudible]. And at this point she's
actually only 16 years old. She's remarkably young. But there was something
about her even then. That summer when she was 16, she was taken by her parents on a trip
throughout Europe and then she ended her summer jaunts at Versailles where she was introduced
among others to Marie Antoinette. And the manners of the French court were the most notorious for
foreigner to master. And yet Georgiana just
carried it off, the curtsy, everything. She was perfect and she was a great hit
among the French and this alerted both her parents and people back home in
England that here was somebody who was a natural, who was clearly going to make a big
splash in society when she came out. And the fact that the French liked her
so much and that she immediately became great friends with Marie Antoinette just
added to the sparkle and luster of this young girl. And who knows what Georgiana would have
been like if she'd had that chance to have a coming out year to explore what
it was like to be young and full of promise and potential and to go out in
the world, perhaps make a few mistakes, meet people, meet the right man.
None of those things happened. They returned to England and
who came knocking at the door, but the Duke of Devonshire, and he was the greatest catch
in the country at the time. The Spencers were incredibly wealthy. Very few families
rivaled them at the time. But the one family which definitely
rivaled them definitely had more money, more property, more political
power, was the Devonshire family. And so when he turned up and announced
that he would like to propose marriage the Spencers were stunned and in
particular, Georgiana's mother, Lady Spencer was so torn. On the one hand, she just knew that, she knew in
her heart that it was a mistake, that her daughter was way
too young to get married. But on the other hand, she just
thought, well, this is just crazy. Why, why would I deny my
daughter, my eldest child, the opportunity to have
the first rank after, after the royal family in,
in the country? This, this, this would make no sense. And so she reconciled the idea
in her mind by saying, well, I'll be there to guide her and I know
I'll be with her every step o the way. And therefore everything
will be plain sailing. And because Georgiana was
only 16 years old when this youngish man turned up, he was
actually about 11 years older than her. But when this youngish man turns up and
proposed and everyone was making a big fuss about him, she decided, well,
yes, I suppose I am in love with him. You know, he seems nice enough and everyone's going
on about he's the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke and so she sort of convinced
herself because she liked to please people. She was a great people
pleaser. That surely this was so. And so barely having
exchanged more than you know, two conversations with
him, uh they were married. I think it was about five
seconds after the wedding that it's not that she had doubts, but because she was always too young to
have the self knowledge to have doubts. But she sort of began to realize that
the dream that her parents were selling her wasn't quite in
alignment with reality. And the way this became apparent was
that the first social right that the new Duchess of Devonshire
had to do with the Duke, was the two of them needed to go to court. And Georgiana needed to be presented to
Queen Charlotte as the Duchess and the Duke was late and they just had to hang
around waiting for him. And that that simply isn't the
behavior of an ardent lover. That's not the actions of a young
husband who is just wild about his wife. And Lady Spencer made all
sorts of excuses. In fact, she did more than make
excuses for the Duke. She- her method of training her daughter
was to lay all the blame on Georgiana's shoulders. So if the Duke
wasn't paying her attention, it was because Georgiana
wasn't trying hard enough. She wasn't engaging him enough. She wasn't talking to him about the
things that would interest him and so on. And this made Georgiana feel very insecure and somewhat lonely because she had, she had gone from zero to sixty. She literally walked from the nursery
out into this very public and high status marriage. And if we go back to Chatsworth, so this is what she moved into and
waiting for her on the first day that she arrived were all the servants, rows and rows and rows of them and the
housekeeper handed her keys with great ceremony and she met the
manager of the estate, Heaton who would become her great enemy. And she was expected to start
managing this extraordinary estate. And she really had no idea how, and it became very quickly apparent
that the servants were in charge of the house, not her and theft went up. The quality of the food
went down. You know, she just couldn't quite manage it. And the way she reacted says
quite a lot about her personality. She didn't complain. She, she didn't retreat. She decided,
well, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to handle all of this. So I'm going to be charming instead, I'm going to sail forth and I'm
going to conquer with niceness. And so when she hit London
society, still quaking inside, the one thing that she could
do was she could be nice, she could be charming and she was well
educated and clever and she could engage. And 18th century society at that
point was a very tight circle. There were not that many
people in the United Kingdom. I think most estimates there
are about 10 million people, 10 million britons in the United Kingdom, so the upper 10,000 really was the
upper 10,000 and of that the ton, T, O, N, the highest,
highest echelons of society, no more than about 1500 so
everybody knew each other. And unlike, say later on in America where you
would have different centers of power, centers of politics, centers of
commerce, London really was it, which meant that the actor David Garrick
would be good friends with the artist Joshua Reynolds, who would be good friends
with the Spencers, who would know the latest designers, who would be good friends with
Richard Sheridan, the playwright. Everybody knew each other. They had this curious effect
of creating this hot house of ideas and fashion and art. And in walks this unformed girl who
has a very bossy mother and an absent husband who she knows, everyone is expecting the Duchess
of Devonshire to make her mark. And so she turned to fashion, has a way of exploring what
that mark was going to be. And literally, I think within a month of being in London
in 1774 she had done that and she did it by observing women's headdresses and
their coiffeurs and rather mischievously deciding that she would turn things upside
down and start wearing six foot tall feathers. So she walked into her first ball
wearing the most enormous feathers. There was so tall, these ostrich feathers that she'd managed
to tie together that she had to sit, she had to kneel on the floor
of her carriage to fit them in. And she walked in and there
was this collective gasp at the sort of almost a affrontery,
this young impotent girl, the new Duchess of Devonshire who was
wearing these extraordinary feathers. And then the next day everyone
rushed out to get her own. And there was such a run on feathers that
that apparently funeral feathers were being stolen and dyed different colors, any color other than black. And people began to take notice of
her. What was she going to wear next, what color was she going to
wear? And she loved this. This was something that she could do and
she had the money to really experiment with. So when she wore brown, not
a particularly exciting color, she did it with a slight twist of puce
in the brown and it became known as the Devonshire brown. And suddenly
everyone was wearing Devonshire Brown. She tried a new kind of
gray powder on her head. It became known as the Devonshire gray. And the more she tried these things,
the more people took notice of her, the more they imitated her, the more newspapers began to write about
her because she had come into public notice at a very important
moment in 18th century history, which was the alignments of better
roads with better communication, more efficient printing
presses, greater literacy. And whereas ten years
before she had come out, there were three newspapers in
London. Now there were five dailies, six weeklies, a dozen monthlies, and they needed something to write about. And there was the Duchess of Devonshire
and her friends because naturally she soon acquired a circle of friends. And the problem with
this circle of friends, it was known as the Devonshire house
circle was that Very few of them were actually friends. They were, you know, they were acquaintances.
They were hangers on. They were the wives of of husbands
who were friends with her husband, the Duke of Devonshire. So they all
belonged to the same political party. They were known as the Whigs.
And you could see them, you could roughly translate that into,
say, the Democrats. So they were, they were, they stood against the
power of the King. They were, so, they were not Tories. They were
antislavery, pro-American. Very much so actually. And interested in opening up elections
to a wider section of the electorate. And the interesting thing
about this portrait is that
it really is utterly fake. This is the inauthentic Georgiana. What you're looking at here is this
marvelous 18th century portrait, this idealized portrait.
She's looking at the couch, she's looking at you, the viewer, she looks calm, she looks stately, she looks dignified, she's still only 17. And actually nothing about her life at
this point reflects or is reflected in anything to do with this
particular portrait. So to give you an example
of what I mean, in 1775, she and her friends came up with this
clever wheeze that they all started wearing gold collars around their
necks with tags and hers read if found, please return to Devonshire House. And she just thought that was incredibly
funny, which it was, you know, but but also somewhat tasteless. And then she thought of this
other really clever idea, which annoyed people greatly. But then they sort of thought
was funny and charming, which was they've, she would go to a party and just
when things were getting quiet, she would inhale and hold the
air in her cheeks like this. And people just thought it was
hilarious. This was this marvelous. So this was the kind of juvenile things
that Georgiana was getting up to and her husband tolerated. And I think part of, part of her behavior was an
attempt to get his attention. And we know this because there was a
recorded scene where her mother was visiting and they were having tea, Lady Spencer and Georgiana and the Duke
walked in and sat down and Georgiana had got up and went over to him and sat
on his lap to give him a kiss hello. And he didn't like public displays
of affection at all from anybody. And so when she did that,
he immediately stood up. So she fell onto the ground. And then he just stalked out of the room. People began to notice that this
incredibly popular girl who everyone was imitating and had this
great sense of style didn't seem to be loved by her
husband. Everyone else loved her, but, but not him. And
once people noticed that, the Duke became open season and
some of her friends thought, well, you know, maybe I
can, I can capture him. And in 1778 the Duke had his first
public affair with one of her friends, women called Lady Jersey. I say public because he'd actually already
been having an affair even when they were married. He actually even had a secret daughter
named Charlotte that Georgiana didn't know anything about. But when Lady Jersey turned off
and they began having this very, very public affair throughout the summer. Georgiana couldn't help but notice. And at that point the
humiliation did something to her. It was like, it sort of opened up this gulf
of need that she couldn't fill. And so she filled it in other ways. And the first way she filled it was
through the excitement of gambling. Everybody gambled in the 18th century. It was just a hobby. Everyone did it. So it wasn't- even her own parents did it. Her mother came from the Points family. And the Points is were famous allegedly
for having the the Bible on the table, but the cards in the drawer. So, and her father was a great gambler. So it wasn't unusual for Georgiana
to be at the gaming tables, but for her it was something
else. And she very, very quickly became an addict because
in those days they didn't have, they didn't have the word
addiction. They didn't, they could see if somebody was
caught in the vise of gambling, but they couldn't name it. And
if you can't name something, then it has a power that's so much
greater than once you can readily identify it. And she started to rack
up the most incredible debts, debts that even now are just
jaw dropping in today's terms. She began to rack up millions that she
hid and she would be chased by creditors and people would start
applying to the Duke. And he began to get suspicious and angry.
What's going on Georgiana? She would, he would say, and she had the typical gambler's
manner of dealing with it, was that she would confess to a 10th of
her debts and there'd be a great fuss about paying them off. And she
would promise, never do it. Do it again without having reveled
the other 90% so which would mean that nothing ever really get got paid off. It was always just quietly getting
bigger and bigger in the background. And as she became more frightened and
nervous about the truth coming out, she developed a second addiction. She became bulemic. And again, they
didn't have the word for bulemia, but her mother would
write to her about it. And so that's how we can identify
it. And she would say, no darling, why do you do this? Why,
why do you, you know, binge on one day and then
purge immediately afterwards. And it's this endless
cycle. What makes you do it? And Georgiana didn't know, she couldn't, she couldn't explain herself, but it took hold of her. And then from bulemia she passed to
drugs because they had laudanum in those days and she became a drug addict. So by the time she was 20,
she was a gambling addict, a drug addict, and a bulemic and childless. And of those four things, being childless was the worst because the Duke would not, and could not pay off this vast mountain
of debts that she was accruing until he had an heir by the terms of
the will. Once he had an heir, then he could mortgage his estate, he
could sell off land. But until then, he was on a relatively
tight budget. So he, the relation between them were
really began to deteriorate. And this is where Georgiana's life
took a sudden and strange turn, which is that- there she is in 1779- which is that she realized
that if she couldn't find solace in her husband and she couldn't
have an affair with another man that because if she did
divorce would ensue, and it was simply unthinkable in those
days for a woman to have an affair in the 18th century before she had secured
an heir to her husband's family. There were, there were women, and she began to have these very
passionate relationships with women. One of them was with Lady Diana Beauclerk, who drew this while the
wonderful drawing here. Another was with Ms. Mary Graham, whose portrait is in the
National Gallery in Washington. And the most important though was with
a woman called Lady Elizabeth Foster, Bess. Bess turned up in their
lives in the early 1780s, where by this time they had been no, still no children for six,
seven years. And they were, the Devonshires were at bath where
Georgiana was drinking the waters and the hope that that would
increase her fertility. And in walks Lady Elizabeth Foster into
one of the places where Georgiana's drinking these spa waters. And
she had this great tale of woe. She had been separated from
her two sons by her father, by her husband, Mr. Foster. Her father has abandoned her the Earl
Bristol out of fury for her behavior. And she was living in penury in Bath. And unlike Georgiana though, she was really, really, really good at fakery. It was once said about her that she, she was so fake as a person
that if it become real, but she was a genuine, real fake. And it meant that she had
this power of being able to, she couldn't please everybody the way
Georgiana could make a great scene at a party, but she could please one person. She could make a study of that one person
and make herself completely pleasing to him or her. And so she
gets introduced to Georgiana. Georgiana has a tale of woe. Bess
has a even greater tale of woe. And so Bess made herself both
an indispensable listener
to Georgiana you know, never wearied of talking to her, hearing
about her, hearing about her problems, advising her, being her great friends,
but also elicited from Georgiana, um you know, Georgiana's
compassionate side, loved people. She loved to help people.
And here was, here was a project. Here was somebody who
desperately needed her help. And it was only outsiders who began to
tweak that there was something really wrong here. But Bess was becoming a kind of gatekeeper
that you couldn't get to Georgiana except via Bess. This
really annoyed Lady Spencer, as you can imagine that Bess was somehow the be all and
end all in Georgiana's life. And the really astute among Georgiana's
friends also realized something else, which was that Bess imitated
Georgiana, you know, the way she talked, the way she dressed, the way she looked as if, you know, she was studying her for a part and
that it would be one day she could be Georgiana and it and it
gave her friends the creeps. But Georgiana simply couldn't see that. And so there is Georgiana and what's rather good about this
particular Gainsborough portrait in 1783. It's just when she's met Bess and
is falling into her clutches is it, you can see there is this
wistfulness about her. There is this yearning that comes through
and so it made her a kind of easy mark for the right or one could say the
wrong person, which is what Bess was. So Bess moved herself into Chatsworth
and Devonshire house and sort of became, you know, part of the furniture
almost. She was poor little Bess, poor little Bess who, you know, was so grateful for
Georgiana's love and all that. And Georgiana was just obsessed with
her and was madly in love with her. So madly in love with her that
she didn't notice that Bess was also making a play for the Duke. And very soon was having an
affair with both of them. And this went on for quite a
while. Over a year, and during which time Georgiana became finally
became pregnant and it's often been said that Georgiana was finally happy. You had somebody who loved her and she
stopped being anxious and so finally became pregnant. But then Bess also became
pregnant with the Duke's child. And at that point it all came
out and Georgiana was devastated, absolutely devastated by Bess's betrayal. And this is the reaction. It's a Cartoon by Rowlandson
and you can just see the, well, as I said before, the chaos
that now descends on Devonshire house. Georgiana's in the middle. She's
the one with the blue hats. On the, on the other side
is her sister Harriet, and the Prince of Wales is there, and it, it's just, it, the kind of the measure at this or the
measure of vice as it were just rose inexorably during the eighties. And it was as if there
was a kind of a, well, I mean it was like a juggernaut that was
only going to head in one direction and some people wondered whether or not Bess
in her way was kind of encouraging it that you know, it was kind of
part of a plan that, you know, she loved Georgiana, but it wouldn't be nice if Georgiana
destroyed herself and then, well then she would just be
her and the Duke and you know, and there was a point in the late 1780s
where Georgiana's debts were so bad that the Duke did begin to
talk about separation. And then a friend of the
Devonshire house circle, one of those friends did say to Bess, a man called James took her
aside and said, you know, if you, if it turns out that you are in any way
instrumental to Georgiana's banishment or being separated from the Duke, you realize that no one
would ever receive you. And that made Bess sort of realize which
side her her bread was buttered on. And then she worked quite hard
for reconciliation and there was, and so the three of them sort of continued
in their somewhat uneasy menage à trois. They were frequently
jealous of each other. You know, in a threesome you can never really
be quite sure who was the outsider. Sometimes it was the Duke,
sometimes it was Georgiana, and more frequently, often it did seem to be
Georgiana. And she felt, you know, the Duke and Bess had each other. But who did she really have that was
hers that she didn't have to share. And she was 36. She at this point had produced
three children, including the heir. And she fell in love with a
young man called Charles Gray, who was seven years her
junior, amazingly handsome. One day he'd become prime minister Earl Gray with a reform bill. So
had a great future ahead of him. But at the time he was passionate, he was young and he was full of ideas
and she just fell so hard for him. And they started having an affair
and then she became pregnant. And when the Duke heard about it, he
suddenly unaccountably became jealous. I mean, after everything they had
been through, he became jealous. He was furious. And he gave her
an ultimatum. He said, look, you have to make a choice. Either you give up Gray and
the baby that you're carrying, you'll never be able to see it again, in
which case I'll forgive you eventually. And you can stay on as the Duchess
and live here and everything. Or if you choose Gray and
the baby you're carrying the, not only will I divorce you, but
I will prevent you from ever, ever seeing your three
children ever again. And so Georgiana made the difficult
decision to give up Gray and the baby she was carrying, but the Duke didn't
just stop there. He said, okay, you know, you're not only
going to have to give him up, I insist that you going into exile. You have to go to Europe and stay there
until I feel like calling you back. And at this point it looked as
though Bess was going to win, that Georgiana had indeed
destroyed herself and she's
going to be safely out of the way in Europe and she's going
to have everything she wanted. And then something really
extraordinary happened, which is not that somebody
took her aside or anything, but she just suddenly realized how much
she loved Georgiana and that all the years that she had spent being jealous
of her and sometimes undermining her, whatever were had been a tragic
waste of time because in fact, Georgiana had always been there for her. And so she turned around to the
Duke and said, you know what, if you're going to banish
Georgiana, then I'm going to go to, I will go with her to Europe and I will
not come back until you allow her back as well. And he, he was so shocked that he sort of
tried to call her bluff and said, fine, off you go. And so off they went and Georgiana
being Georgiana and she was so popular, quite a few of her friends went
with her as well. And they had, I think they sort of went around Europe.
They, they visited Marie Antoinette, they went to stay with Edward Gibbon
for a while. You know, they, they, I mean she obviously missed
her children dreadfully, but she always had friends
wherever they went. And eventually he did relent and they
were both allowed back. But by this time, we're now talking in the mid
1790s and times have changed. The Whigs were not only out of
power but disgraced as a party. And she had, Georgiana herself had
suffered a great social disgrace, everyone knew what had happened. And she was no longer the
great Duchess of Devonshire. She was just, you know, a woman approaching her forties who had
got into trouble and was now back having to negotiate a new social scene and many
people at this point would have just given up and lots of people
thought that she would, that she would just retire to the country
and never come to London because she was a bit of a social embarrassment now. And this is what makes so many people
love Georgiana is as you can see from this portrait of her, the famous
portrait by Gainsborough, if you look at that raised
eyebrow, is that there was much, much more to her then even she knew in
the beginning and that in in her hour of total emotional distress, she did a reckoning and
what am I responsible for, what have I done and what
can I do to change this, and she stopped drinking.
She stopped gambling, she learned to control her relationship
with food and instead she began to work on her mind. She worked
on her rock collection. She became quite a noted mineralogist. She concentrated and
bringing up her children. She concentrated on helping to bring the
Whig party back together again and the turn of the century after 1801 this
became a real possibility that the Whigs could finally get back into power. After being outcast since 1784 and 1806
the the Whigs did come to power and Georgiana became the official
hostess of the Whig party. She held this great dinner
and six weeks later she died. But it was one of those lives where instead of being a cautionary tale, it's actually an illustration of how it
is never too late to be the person that you could have been, that this young girl who was born to
everything and married into even higher things, who then proceeded to throw almost all
these advantages away for understandable reasons. When she had finally done that
and had only herself left, slowly and gradually made those steps
to what we knocked what we now call authenticity, discover who she was really and what she
could genuinely achieve and went out on a high and she was one of the few working
mothers at that time as it were, who could do that? She repaired her relationship with her
children to such an extent that the day after she died, her eldest daughter
who was also called Georgiana, known as Little G wrote and said, "Oh my dear is my darling departed mother. You who loved me so tenderly. I wanted to throw violets on your bed as
you had thrown sweetness throughout my life, but they would not let me." But I think that kind of that kind
of love is rare and is a testament to Georgiana and I think, I a hope to all of us that the, the quest to be ourselves may be
long and rocky and full of pitfalls, but that it is within our grasp and
that those in the 18th century were struggling just like us today to find
out who we are and what we can be. Thank you very much.
