Sordid fun
Jan Morris
The Two Duchesses Arthur CalderMarshall (Hutchinson E6.95) A born republican, a Welsh patriot and an admirer of the Victorian virtues, 1 am hardly a promising audience for a book about life among the English bon ton at the end of the eighteenth-century, and sure enough the subject matter of Arthur Calder-Marshall's new book struck me as unusually repellent. It concerns the fifth Duke of Devonshire's persistent efforts to breed a son and heir, and hardly a page of it does not describe an affectation, a selfishness, a deceit, a squalor, an arrogance or an appalling indifference to the realities of life.
Yet so rich is the story, so fascinating are many of its characters, above all so elegantly but scrupulously does Mr Calder
Marshall tell the tale, that I enjoyed every
sentence of the book, and read most of it at a sitting. It is hardly a cautionary tale, except perhaps for Dukes of Devonshire, because its circumstances are so utterly remote from ours: but the more I read of it, the most forgiveable and familiar I found the failings of its cast — familiar not merely in my own contemporaries, but, horror of horrors, actually in me!
Ignorance, pure ignorance. contributed to my enjoyment. I had never heard of the Duke's predicament, or of its unorthodox solution. The first of his Duchesses, the high-spirited and extravagant Georgiana Spencer, seemed unable to give him an heir — seemed unable, indeed, after the first years of their marriage, to coax him unaided out of frigidity. Fortunately his mistress, Lady Elizabeth Foster, had a more virilising technique, so the three eventually set up house together, each acting as a stimulant upon the others, and in moments of emergency, so Mr Calder-Marshall conjectures, very likely sharing the same bed.
The system worked, and Georgiana, after producing two daughters, at last gave birth to a baby Marquis of Hartington. In the meantime Elizabeth, too, had also pro duced a boy and a girl by the Duke, and all this complex menage constituted a sort of family. The two ladies were the closest of friends. The Duke, who was really interested only in hunting, drink and .dogs, was fond of them both in his way, and when the first one died, presently he married the other. What illuminates the anecdote, for it is hardly more, is the extraordinary ebullience of its characters. Georgiana, whom I came to like very much, was a woman of uncontrollable impulse, a terrific gambler, a ter rific debtor, an enthusiastic meddler, a grand slam of a duchess. Elizabeth, whom I detested from the start, was just the oppo site: daughter to the legendary Earl of Bris tol, the Earl-Bishop, she was the very image of the schemer, always a step ahead of the game, who began adult life as the wife of an indigent Irish politician, and ended it first in line of precedence after the Royal Family.
Then there was the pious and interfering Countess Spencer, Georgiana's irrepressible mother, and the social-climbing banker Thomas Coutts, and C. J. Fox swilling his five bottles of claret at a session, and the wild Caro Ponsonby, lover to Byron and wife to Melbourne, and a host of other subsidiary players, none of them ordinary, most of them devious, and half of them known by the nicknames peculiar to the Cavendish family — 'Lady Liz', 'Mrs Rat', or Charles 'The Eyebrow'.
I loathed it, and I revelled in it. As Mr Calder-Marshall says, Georgiana and her friends often lost in an hour of faro more than an English working-man earned in his entire lifetime, and the aloofness of the Devonshire House set to the anxieties of more ordinary people is excruciating to observe. Yet in a curious way they are not unlikeable. They are like theatre people, hiding behind their public masks truer hearts than one supposes. If they were indifferent to the poor, they were truly affectionate to their children, and often to each other. The debauchery of the age, sordid though it often sounds, had a lot of fun to it too, and if these people all too soon ran to gout, fat or consumption. in their youth they were undeniably beautiful animals,
Scholars may well say that The Two Duchesses has made a contribution to history by rummaging out the truth, or what seems to be the truth, about the Duke and his ladies. I am grateful to Mr CalderMarshall for other reasons: for the splendid entertainment of his book, for its into a society apparently so alien, and for tribute by default, so to speak, to the Pail' ence of the common people, the advantab'es of Welshness, and the qualities, to eMelg, so soon after the deaths of his V" Duchesses, of the magnificent Victorians.
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