The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians. Janice Hadlow
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it was the earl who was the unfaithful partner, eloping with his mistress but sending the baby boy produced by the liaison back to the family home, where he was affectionately cared for by Pembroke’s much-tried countess.
A higher-profile example of marital conventions turned upside down was the talk of the country for most of its thirty-year duration. The relationship between the 5th Duke of Devonshire and his duchess, Georgiana, was a crowded one by any standards, including not only the ducal husband and wife but also Elizabeth Foster, who joined the Devonshire household as the duchess’s best friend – some said lover – and eventually came to preside over it as the duke’s acknowledged mistress, the mother of two of his children and, after Georgiana’s death, his second wife. Unlike the long-suffering Lady Pembroke, who Horace Walpole thought had all the purity of a Madonna, Georgiana pursued her own relationships, most notably with the politician Charles Grey, by whom she had a daughter. The baby was raised by Grey’s parents, but Georgiana’s legitimate children were brought up at Chatsworth alongside those of her husband and his mistress.
For all its very public indifference to accepted standards, the Devonshire marriage came to an end in the traditional way, with the death of one of the partners. This was not the case with a relationship whose noisy dissolution scandalised a mesmerised public, and seemed to some outraged observers to have rewarded bad behaviour on all sides. The union of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton was a typical elite match. Augustus Fitzroy was heir to the Grafton dukedom; Anne Liddell was a rich man’s daughter who brought a huge dowry of £40,000 to her new husband. It looked as though money had been the prime consideration in arranging the marriage, but the duchess claimed that she and the duke had been very much in love when first married in 1756. Whatever had brought them together, the Graftons were not happy for long. The duchess was soon complaining of the duke’s gambling, drinking and adultery, and, perhaps hoping to shock him into better behaviour, she left him and retreated to her father’s house. It proved a huge miscalculation on her part. Grafton immediately took up with Nancy Parsons, described by Horace Walpole as ‘a girl distinguished by a most uncommon degree of prostitution’, who was said to have earned a hundred guineas in a single week ‘from different lovers, at a guinea a head’.2 The duchess asked for, and received, a formal separation, whereupon the duke installed Nancy Parsons in her rooms and allowed her to wear the duchess’s jewels and preside over her dinner table.
As a separated woman, only the most unimpeachable conduct would have shored up the duchess’s tottering reputation; but she was only twenty-eight in 1765, and perhaps felt it was a little early to retire from the world, especially given the humiliating way in which she had been replaced by Nancy Parsons. Soon her ‘flirtations’ were the subject of disapproving gossip. She dallied with the Duke of Portland, who married someone else without telling her first. Then, in 1767, she met the Earl of Ossory at Brighton. They began an affair, and she found herself pregnant with his child. Despite his own well-publicised adultery, Grafton was outraged; perhaps his recent appointment as first minister had hardened his usually fluid moral resolve. He prosecuted the duchess for adultery and won. She was persuaded not to counter-sue in return for a generous allowance, and her agreement to hand over into Grafton’s care the children from their marriage, who were taken from her as she lay in bed about to give birth to Ossory’s baby. The Graftons were divorced by an Act of Parliament in 1769; three days later, the duchess married Ossory.
It was this last chapter in the duchess’s chequered story that provoked most disapproval from guardians of conventional values. Princess Amelia, George II’s plain-speaking spinster daughter, observed grimly that ‘the frequency of these things amongst people of the highest rank had become a reproach to the nation’. She particularly objected to the duchess’s remarriage, as it suggested that an adulterous affair could be transformed, via the agency of divorce, into a state of respectable matrimony. Princess Amelia was not the only member of the royal family who disapproved, especially when the reputation to be washed clean was that of the woman involved. The courtier and diarist Lady Mary Coke overheard the king ask the Lord Chancellor, the country’s most senior legal officer, whether ‘something might be thought of that would prevent the very bad conduct of the ladies, of which there had been very many instances lately’. Later she heard a rumour that ‘His Majesty proposed a bill should be brought in, to prevent ladies divorced from their husbands from marrying again’.3
In the event, nothing more was heard of the king’s desire to enforce female fidelity through parliamentary legislation, but George did all he could, by every other means at his disposal, to signal his distaste for the brittle, serial immorality practised so flamboyantly by so many of his loose-living aristocratic peers. The image of the worldly, sophisticated womaniser who took his pleasure with insouciant disregard for his marriage vows had been extremely attractive to George’s father and grandfather, both of whom believed that their masculinity was enhanced by the tang of a little adultery; but George was immune to its appeal. He conformed to a very different eighteenth-century type, and, as a result, looked towards a very different vision of the married state. As the historian Amanda Vickery has shown, not all eighteenth-century men were amoral pleasure-seekers, drawing their gratification from the bottle, the hunt or the gaming table, believing, as Horace Walpole wrote of the Duke of Grafton, that ‘the world should be postponed for a whore and a horse-race’.4
For many sober, conscientious, diligent young men, it was not through such expensive and ephemeral amusements that they hoped to establish their identity and position in the world; it was marriage with some respectable young woman which would allow them truly to come into their own and make their way in life. Marriage was not a burden to be endured, a restraint to be kicked against, but a prize towards which they endlessly planned and schemed. ‘My imagination was excited with pleasurable ideas of what was coming,’ wrote one eager groom for whom the longed-for day was at last in sight; ‘There was not one thing on earth which gave me the slightest anxiety or doubt! Nothing but a delightful anticipation of happiness and independence!’5 The yearning to find the right wife, with whom they could establish a home and raise a family, was, for men like these, an all-consuming desire, its achievement a source of lasting satisfaction.
Their outlook was one with which George III instinctively identified. He was socially conservative, sexually restrained, dutiful, exacting and often painfully self-aware. He was also loyal, decent and hungry for emotional warmth, if supplied on his own terms, and by a woman who would not intimidate or overwhelm him. The template towards which he was drawn, both by his character and his sense of his public mission, placed wedlock at the very pinnacle of human emotional experience. ‘This state,’ wrote the clergyman Wetenhall Wilkes in a bestselling pamphlet first published in 1741, and still in print when George and Charlotte were married twenty years later, ‘is the completest image of heaven we can ever receive in this life, productive of the greatest pleasures we can enjoy on this earth.’6
This was a vision of matrimony in which, whilst considerations of property and money were not ignored, it was the harmony of the couple at its centre that mattered most. It was a union into which both partners entered willingly, with an equal commitment to making it work, a marital joint-enterprise in which husband and wife were both prepared to sacrifice individual needs and desires in order to secure the success of the wider family project. Both were prepared to involve themselves in the interests of the other, since shared tastes and mutually satisfying pursuits were considered to be the strongest bedrock upon which a happy marriage rested. Inside the partnership, the most propitious emotional climate was considered to be one of steady affection rather than volcanic eruptions of feeling. A firm endeavour to please was thought more significant than physical attraction, and generosity of spirit and mildness of temper most important of all.
The degree to which this model of matrimony – once dubbed by academics ‘the companionate marriage’ – was a new phenomenon which emerged in the mid-eighteenth century has been one of the most hotly contested debates in social history in recent years. Little credence is now given to the once widely accepted assertion that, before this date, most marriages were cold, commercial contracts, dominated by financial