Ladies of Devonshire House
Dearest Bess. By D. M. Stuart. (Methuen, 21s.)
THE ladies of the Devonshire House set were seldom idle. TheY planned and schemed for the support of Government and fot? the fall of Government, according to its complekion. Thei declared that this or that Whig measure was 'universally approved; and this or that Tory measure was 'wholly odious.' They led society in London; and in the country they fussed around nevi 'improvements' by Mr. Adam or Mr. Wyatt or Mr. Wyatville. Their fortunes were fabulous; yet some were sadly sunk in fabik lous debt. They patronised the Continent and Men of Letters and Royalty. The earlier generation allowed their Rousseauian enthusiasm to lead them into infidelities, the later were almost excessively devoted to their husbands. They adored their children with a fierce maternalism, yet were happily relieved of the more irksome aspects of motherhood by a series of 'good, faithful creatures'—nurses, governesses and tutors. Above all they were family women, for they knew that 'family'—Cavendish, Spencer, Granville or Leveson-Gower—was all that really counted in, England, whatever the treacheries of the Regent or the follies 01 the Duke, whatever the alarming rumours of cholera or of rick'
burnings that suggested a nightmare world outside their own. With all these activities, they still found time to write incessantly in letters and journals. Most of these outpourings have now been given to posterity. It is only sad that they tell us, on the whole, so little that we really want to know.
Lady Elizabeth Fostet, afterwards second wife of the fifth Duke of Devonshire, the subject of Miss Stuart's biography, was a somewhat resented interloper in this gracious Whig world. It was unfortunate for her, perhaps, that the cleverest of all the Devonshire ladies, 'Hary-0'. Lady Granville, should have been her stepdaughter and her greatest enemy. Miss Stuart's aim is to rehabilitate the second duchess from her stepdaughter's sharp strictures. It hardly seems worth while. 'Dearest Bess,' it is true, 14c1 a background that would serve as full excuse to a modern social worker. Her parents' marriage was a broken one, her own first marriage to Mr. Foster was loveless and ended in separation. Her children were taken from her. If she, then, manoeuvred her way into the Devonshire world, who can blame her? The great Georgiana took her up, and Georgiana's husband made her his mistress. It was not a particularly attractive matron a trois, but the fact that Lady Elizabeth gained most materially does not make her less.pitiable. She had to work very hard at indispensa- bility and she deserved her triumph when, after Georgiana's death, the Duke made an honest Duchess of her. For all that, she was a rather fifth-rate sort of Becky Stiarp—pretty, full of artful artlessness, tough, insinuating, pretentious and snobbish, It is to the credit of her stepson—the bachelor duke and patron of Paxtonthat he resisted his sister's attempts to have her ostracised, but that is about all one can say. There is a certain pathos about the late eighteenth-century Devonshire 'aches— Elizabeth fighting for sinecures for her illegitimate children, Georgiana, loaded with debts, being unfaithful in middle age, half blind and swollen in her last years, Lady Bessborough, Georgiana's sister, seeing her lover, Lord Granville, marrying her niece; but it is a shop-soiled, second-rate pathos. The Devonshire Whigs may have been better patriots in the Revolutionary years than the Holland House set, but it is to old Lady Melbourne or Lady Holland that we must go for the wit and wickedness which Thackeray gave to that old survival into a stricter age, ' Lady Kew.
With the Howard sisters, Georgiana's grand-daughters, we enter a different age. Caroline, the eldest, who married into the Tory Lascelles family, resided mainly in Yorkshire and was therefore the recipient not only of personal news from her rather careerist Whig sisters, but also of the 'right point of view' about Mr.
Canning and Mr. Huskisson, the Court and the We are here much more in the world of Sybil, of those shrewd-silly, rumour-busy ladies who played national politics as their family game. The domestic lives of Caroline and her sisters, Lady Dover and Lady Sutherland, are no longer raffish like their grand- mother's, evangelicalism already strikes a stern note, hypochondria has ousted robustness, motherhood often imposes visits to Eastbourne or Brighton rather than Georgiana's beloved grandeur of the Alps, widowhood has become a lifelong memorial service. Nevertheless, there are curious anomalies that still survive. There is the strange predilection for French royalty, for example, in such good Whigs. It was not only their horror of revolutionary excess that separated Georgiana and Bess from the views of their friend Mr. Fox. They were personally devoted to that personification of reaction, Madame de Polignac, More strange still perhaps is the Howard sisters' interest in the exiled Charles X, though, as Lady Sutherland remarked, 'I felt more afraid and nervous than I ever did with sitting royalties.' It all marries curiously with their passion for the Bill. But such interesting sidelights are unhappily rare. There are glimpses in both books that intrigue—of the estrangement from the Regent and the wooing of Canning, of William IV at Brighton and of Princess Victoria at Claremont— but the greater part is indeed gossip, and it must unfortunately be said that the editors of both books have chosen to set this gossip in a background of aimless historical allusion that is itself never more than gossipy.
ANGUS WILSON
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