On June 7, 1774, her 17th birthday, Georgiana Spencer married William Cavendish, the 5th Duke of Devonshire, in a quiet ceremony at Wimbledon Parish Church. By nightfall she was the Duchess of Devonshire, mistress of one of the largest aristocratic estates in England. She barely knew the man she had married. The match had been arranged by her mother, Lady Spencer, who had spent years negotiating the union.
The bride brought a dowry of £20,000 and the weight of one of England’s oldest Whig families. The groom brought a dukedom, eight country houses, roughly 200,000 acres of land, and an income so vast that even his own lawyers could not estimate it accurately. Georgiana arrived at Chatsworth two days later to find a household of about 120 staff lined up to receive her. The Duke walked past her without taking her hand, gave an order about dinner, and went upstairs.
She was left alone in the painted drawing room. That night she wrote to her mother that she was happy and that her husband was kind. Historians who studied the letter later noted the spacing of the sentences suggested she had been weeping. The marriage quickly settled into a fixed pattern.
The Duke was cool, reserved, and expected his wife to produce a male heir and keep up appearances in London. In return, he allowed her freedom of movement and friendship. He also maintained a long-term relationship with a milliner, Charlotte Spencer, who had borne him a daughter before the marriage. That daughter lived in the household and was raised partly under Georgiana’s guardianship.
Within a year of the wedding, Georgiana had become the most imitated woman in London. A single ostrich feather sent to her by a diplomat sparked a fashion craze that emptied London’s feather stocks and sent wholesalers to North Africa. Her hairstyles, built on wire frames and decorated with miniature scenes, were copied obsessively. She was painted by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Maria Cosway.
Her portrait in the wide blue feathered hat, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1778, brought traffic to a standstill in the surrounding streets. She also turned Devonshire House into a political and social headquarters. Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and the Prince of Wales were regular visitors. By her early twenties she was the unofficial hostess of the Whig opposition.
In 1782 she met Lady Elizabeth Foster, known as Bess, in Bath. Bess was 23, separated from a violent husband, and destitute. She had lost custody of her two children because the law gave them to her husband. Georgiana took her in as a companion.
Within a year, Bess had also become the Duke’s mistress. The three-way arrangement lasted 24 years. Bess gave birth to two of the Duke’s illegitimate children abroad, and the children were later brought back to Devonshire House as foundlings. Georgiana gave birth to three legitimate children: two daughters and, in 1790, the long-awaited male heir.
At one point the household contained the Duke’s three legitimate children, his two illegitimate children by Bess, and the daughter he had fathered before his marriage. Meanwhile, Georgiana was sinking into debt. She gambled heavily at pharaoh, a card game of pure chance. By 1784 her acknowledged losses had reached £100,000—a sum several times the annual income of the entire Devonshire estate.
She borrowed from bankers, dressmakers, foreign ambassadors, her brother, and even her own coachman. She kept double accounts and wrote to creditors under code names. The Duke paid off portions of the debt several times, but the total kept growing. In 1784 she entered politics directly.
When Charles James Fox faced a difficult election in Westminster, Georgiana campaigned for him in person, walking the streets of Covent Garden and visiting tradesmen to ask for their votes. It was unprecedented for a woman of her rank. The Tory press responded with vicious cartoons depicting her as a prostitute who sold kisses for votes. Fox won his seat by a margin of 236 votes, but Georgiana never campaigned in person again.
The image of her embracing butchers followed her for the rest of her life. Around 1790 she fell in love with Charles Grey, a rising young Whig politician who was several years her junior. By the autumn of 1791 she was pregnant. The child could not possibly be her husband’s.
The Duke, acting with cold precision, gave her a choice: she would go abroad, give birth in secret, hand the child to Grey’s parents, and never see him again—or she would lose her three legitimate children. She left England in October 1791. France was in revolutionary turmoil. She gave birth to a daughter in February 1792 in Aix-en-Provence, in a borrowed room attended by a French midwife who did not know her name.
The child was named Eliza Courtney and was sent to Charles Grey’s parents in Northumberland, where she was raised as their adopted daughter. She did not learn until adulthood that the famous Duchess of Devonshire was her real mother. Georgiana remained in exile for almost two years. While she was in Italy, she read letters about her daughter’s progress—she was smiling, she had eaten solid food, she had spoken her first word.
Georgiana replied with formal acknowledgments, knowing the Duke read every line. Marie Antoinette, her long-time correspondent, was executed in October 1793. Georgiana learned of the execution from a Swiss newspaper and later wrote that she had been unable to speak for an entire day. She returned to England in October 1793.
Her two-year-old son did not recognize her. The Duke received her in his library for ten minutes and laid out the terms of return: she would never mention Charles Grey again, she would make no attempt to contact her daughter, and she would resume her social duties as if nothing had happened. She agreed. In the summer of 1796 her right eye began to swell.
The infection, probably a form of orbital cellulitis, spread despite the bleeding, leeches, and blistering treatments of the time. By August the eye had swollen to the size of a fist. On August 14 the cornea ruptured and the eye was lost. She was left permanently scarred on the right side of her face.
Later portraits were carefully composed from her left side. Her health never fully recovered. She suffered from chronic headaches, fevers, skin eruptions, and weight loss. Yet she continued to host parties, write political commentary, and organize entertainments at Chatsworth.
In the spring of 1806 she fell ill with what modern medical historians believe was a liver abscess. She died on March 30, 1806, at the age of 48. After her death, the Duke discovered the true extent of her debts. Over the next two weeks her papers revealed promissory notes, loans from foreign embassies, advances on her jewels, and outstanding debts to seven London bankers.
The total came to roughly £150,000. He paid it off over five years, selling three secondary properties and reducing the family’s cash reserves to a level not seen in a century. He completed the payments in 1811, just weeks before his own death. In 1809 he married Bess Foster, who became the fifth Duchess of Devonshire.
She survived him by 13 years and died in Rome. The Duke’s son, Hart, succeeded him at age 21 and never married. The great Cavendish empire eventually declined under the weight of inheritance taxes introduced in the late 19th century. Devonshire House was sold in 1920 and demolished in 1924.
The wrought-iron gates designed by William Kent were moved to Green Park, where they remain. The cellar beneath the house became the concourse of Green Park tube station. Chatsworth survived because later generations opened it to the public, and it remains in the hands of a charitable trust. Georgiana’s lost daughter Eliza Courtney, kept the secret of her birth and died in 1859.
Her legitimate children lived respectable lives. Her letters, preserved in the Chatsworth Archives and other collections, were edited and published, most fully in Amanda Foreman’s 1998 biography. Once the most reproduced face in England, Georgiana is now remembered mainly for her hats and her gambling. Her role in politics, her impossible marriage, the daughter taken from her in France, and the eye she lost to infection have faded into a simplified popular image.
In 2008, a film called The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley, reintroduced her story to a modern audience. Her portrait in the blue feathered hat now hangs at Chatsworth, where most visitors pass it without knowing who she was.