The Map→Scandal & Society→Chatsworth (Georgiana's ménage à trois)

Scandal & Society · Bakewell, Derbyshire

Chatsworth (Georgiana's ménage à trois)

For some 25 years the celebrity duchess Georgiana shared her marriage and her home with her husband and her best friend Bess Foster in the most famous ménage à trois of the age; Georgiana's own affair with the future PM Charles Grey produced a secret daughter.

StatusDocumented history

Dateménage from 1782, ~25 years

The peopleGeorgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, William Cavendish, 5th Duke, Lady Elizabeth 'Bess' Foster, Charles Grey

The siteChatsworth House, Bakewell

Coordinates53.22750, -1.61070 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Picture the household: a duke, his duchess, and her best friend, all under one roof for twenty-five years. The duke and the friend are lovers with two children; the duchess has a secret daughter by another man. Everyone knows. It holds — because at this level of society the rules bent, provided you weren't caught in a way that couldn't be smoothed over, and provided you were a man.

Georgiana Spencer married the fifth Duke of Devonshire in 1774, aged seventeen. She became the most famous woman in England — fashion leader, Whig political hostess, mobbed celebrity — married to a cold man who wanted an heir. Campaigning for Charles James Fox in the 1784 Westminster election, she was destroyed in the Tory print shops as a duchess who traded kisses for votes. She did canvass, and once admitted the kissing in a letter; the butcher-kissing caricatures were largely misogynist invention, punishing a woman for doing politics in public.

In 1782 Lady Elizabeth "Bess" Foster joined the household — Georgiana's dearest friend and soon the duke's mistress, bearing him two children raised alongside the legitimate ones. The double standard turned savage when Georgiana took her own lover, Charles Grey (the future Reform prime minister). Pregnant by him in 1791, she was given a choice by the duke: divorce or exile. She chose exile, bore Eliza Courtney in France in 1792, and surrendered the baby to Grey's parents. Eliza learned the truth only after Georgiana's death in 1806. Grey married elsewhere and kept his career.

Three years after Georgiana died, the duke married Bess. The mistress became duchess over the body of the friend who had loved them both.

At Chatsworth today the Devonshire Collection holds Georgiana's papers, portraits and personal relics, including a lock of her hair. Distinguish that real archive from Amanda Foreman's 1998 biography and the 2008 film The Duchess, which pressed the parallel with her descendant Diana. Georgiana was more than a victim: operator, writer, and mistress of England's most openly unconventional house — exempt from rules the rising middle class was declaring unthinkable.

More stories at this spot

The gambling she hid

Georgiana's faro losses ran to sums that could have embarrassed even the Cavendish fortune, and she concealed their true scale from her husband for years, borrowing from bankers, friends and moneylenders to cover them. The secrecy gave Bess, and others, quiet leverage over her. It is one of history's neater ironies that the age's most watched woman spent so much energy hiding something.

Two duchesses, one portrait

The Wallace Collection holds a double image of Georgiana and Bess, the friends whose lives twined for a quarter-century around the same man. Their contemporaries endlessly speculated about the exact nature of the women's bond as well as their rivalry; the surviving letters show real affection alongside real damage. They were, whatever else, inseparable to the end.

Eliza's quiet revenge

The daughter Georgiana had to give away, Eliza Courtney, was raised by Charles Grey's parents believing her mother was a distant family friend. When Eliza grew up and had daughters of her own, she named the first Georgiana. It is the only memorial the erased child could leave to the mother the arrangement had taken from her.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Al Fresco & WildLover's Leap, Stoney MiddletonStoney Middleton, Derbyshire · England

Stoney Middleton's Lover's Leap has something most cliffs with that name lack: a woman traceable in the parish record, a reported fall, and a story that ends in survival rather than romantic invention.

Fact & fictionHot spot Queer HeritageMillthorpe (Edward Carpenter & George Merrill)Millthorpe, Derbyshire · England

The market-garden home where the socialist philosopher Edward Carpenter lived openly with George Merrill decades before decriminalisation — sandal-making, vegetarianism and 'the intermediate sex' in the Derbyshire hills. A touch on the backside from Merrill, E.M

Documented history Al Fresco & WildLover's Leap, Ashwood DaleBuxton, Derbyshire · England

Ashwood Dale's Lover's Leap carried an elopement story and helped sell Buxton's picturesque landscape—the named place is historic, but the lovers belong to folklore.

Spotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.