Georgiana arrived in London on the twentieth to find the party already riven with dissent between those who wanted to wait for Fox, who was holidaying in Italy with Mrs. Armistead, and those who were prepared to begin the political battle without him. The Duke of Portland was the nominal leader of the Whigs but his reticent nature meant that members looked to Fox for guidance. There were several men, Sheridan and Grey chief among them, who saw Fox’s absence as an opportunity to assert their authority. The jostling of the young pretenders distracted the party just when it needed to be at its most disciplined and focused. By law, if the King was incapacitated, the Prince of Wales (whose marriage remained a secret) became Regent. The government would have to resign and the Regent would have the opportunity to choose a new cabinet.
The competition between the two parties was similar to that leading up to the 1784 election, but many of the faces had changed during the intervening years. Scores of Whigs, including the Duke of Richmond, had deserted the party and no longer went to Devonshire House. In their place were younger, more idealistic men. Georgiana’s most frequent visitors were now Charles Grey, Sheridan, and the Duke of Bedford, Lady Melbourne’s new lover. Richard Sheridan was envied and mistrusted rather than liked by many members of the party. Fox’s friends resented the way he fawned on the Prince of Wales and seemed so willing to act as his errand-boy. Nor could they fathom why women found him so attractive, “having a red face and an ill look as I ever saw,” mused Sir Gilbert Elliot to his wife. “He employs a great deal of art, with a great deal of pain, to gratify, not the proper passion in such affairs, but vanity; and he deals in the most intricate plotting and under plotting, like a Spanish play.”6 Although he had been a loyal friend to Georgiana she could see through him: “I do not mean to accuse him of any duplicity; in fact he has stood the test of even poverty and I feel convinc’d of the honour of his political sentiments—but he cannot resist playing a sly game.”7 During the Regency crisis Sheridan came to Devonshire House every day, not to see her but Harriet: they had recently become lovers.
Harriet’s affair with Charles Wyndham had been followed by others, as a teasing letter of Sheridan’s shows: “Do not listen to Jack’s elegies or smile at F’s epigrams or tremble at C.W.’s [Lord John Townshend, Richard Fitzpatrick, and Charles Wyndham] frowns.”*8 Their affair began shortly after he had broken off with another Whig hostess, Mrs. Crewe. Duncannon was ignorant of it but everyone else knew, including Sheridan’s wife and his sister Betsy, who never missed an opportunity to malign Harriet. Devonshire House, which provided the setting for so many intrigues, was the easiest place for them to meet, although it was not without its irritations for Sheridan. Recognizing a fellow adventurer, he could not resist teasing Bess, who responded to his arch sallies with ill grace. He also derived little enjoyment from seeing Charles Grey so frequently since they were venomous political rivals. Sheridan could almost always outwit Grey in an argument, which the latter attempted to laugh off, implying that it was beneath him to engage in discussion with a playwright.
While Fox was on his way back from Italy Sheridan appointed himself master-negotiator on behalf of the Prince, a move which greatly increased his political stock and gave him the added satisfaction of watching Grey sulk over dinner at Devonshire House. His desire to hold all the cards meant that his meetings with the Prince were shrouded in secrecy, and the outcome of interviews known only to himself. It made him an unpopular leader and damaged the party’s morale by encouraging suspicion and rival machinations. Georgiana complained that “he cannot resist the pleasure of acting alone, and this, added to his natural want of judgement and dislike of consultation,” made him appear to be double-dealing. Yet at the same time the Whigs were terrified of alienating the Prince, and if the price of office was to pander to Sheridan’s egotistical posturing, most considered it one worth paying.
Fox reached England on November 24, after a breakneck journey covering 1,000 miles in nine days. He had contracted dysentery along the way and was unable to attend any meetings. His supporters wanted him to quash Sheridan’s pretensions, but Fox’s conversations with the Prince were disappointing: it was clear to him that Sheridan had usurped his place. Charles Grey was one of those who found their ambitions thwarted by the playwright’s mischievous meddling. Primed by Sheridan that Grey expected to be given high office, the Prince made a loud speech about his talents and then offered him the “honour” of an extremely junior post.
The Duke of Devonshire, on the other hand, was offered carte blanche but swiftly declined any post. Georgiana and Bess tried in vain to persuade him to take something. Lord John Cavendish also displayed a mulish aversion to office and refused the Chancellorship. It dismayed Georgiana to think there would be no Cavendish presence in the new government. She, too, thought Grey was over-reaching himself in wanting the post and surreptitiously supported Sheridan’s efforts to lower his expectations. It was awkward for her to have to choose between her lover and her husband’s family, but the politician in her won over the romantic.
Georgiana was coy about her transactions with the Prince of Wales: “I saw the Prince this Eveg,” she told Lady Spencer on December 4. “He told me he should absolutely refuse any limited Regency so they might do as they will.” She said nothing more, and it was from other sources that Lady Spencer learned the truth; that as well as pushing her own choices for certain posts, Georgiana jockeyed with Sheridan to advise the Prince. Her mother had heard that in contrast to Sheridan’s plan—for the Prince to accept whatever conditions the Pitt ministry imposed and then, once in power, to dismantle them—Georgiana thought the Prince ought to insist on being granted the full powers of Regent but to show magnanimity afterwards. She asked Georgiana whether it was true
that you have advised the Pr. not to accept on anything but the sole Regency without any limitation, but that when he has got it he should declare that, tho’ his opinion of his former friends was as high as ever, nevertheless he would act as well as he could with those now in office for a certain given time, out of delicacy to the K. and in hope of his recovery. It is added that this advice was as politic as it was good, for it would conciliate the affections of the nation and greatly weaken the power of the present Ministry, who would disunite before the given period approached, and if, in truth, the K. did recover shortly, it would be saving the greatest confusion possible to the nation.9
Such a plan would certainly have been the most politic, but the party and the Prince were too distracted by the imminent prospect of power to think sensibly any more. Three weeks of exemplary behaviour towards his family had strained the Prince’s nerves past breaking point. A disgusted public read about his nightly parties; he had even been seen lurching up St. James’s shouting obscenities and jokes about his father. At Brooks’s when he played cards he said, “I play the lunatic,” meaning the King. Nothing in the Prince’s attitude indicated that he was fit for the responsibilities of Regent, and public opinion began to side with Pitt. Yet the opposition did not care, and in their complacency lay the party’s undoing. While the Whigs argued over the division of spoils, Pitt was carefully studying the options available to his government. Contrary to the Whigs’ expectations, there were several complicated issues to be faced before the Prince took over as head of state. The most important of these was the prospect of the King’s recovery. Since medical opinion was divided, it was not clear what form the Regency should take. It would be awkward if the King recovered and found that his greatest enemies were enjoying themselves at his expense.
When Parliament met on December 10 to discuss the matter, Pitt had prepared himself with a list of arguments and precedents dating back to the insanity of Henry VI in 1454. His cabinet was resolved to be dismissed but nevertheless remained united in his support. By contrast, the chief spokesmen for the Whigs were barely on speaking terms with each other. There had not been a single meeting at which all the party members had been present, and no coherent strategy had been devised. Pitt opened the debate
by suggesting that Parliament should set up a committee to examine the precedents, which would report on its findings within a week. His cool eloquence and the sound reasons he gave for delaying any decision on the Regency made a good impression on the House. Fox leapt to his feet to oppose. It was almost the first time he had left his room since his return from Italy; he was obviously still unwell and his mind, already clouded by his anxiety to show the House he was still the leader of his party, was muddled. He opened his mouth and inflicted on his own party one of the most damaging assaults it had ever sustained. Pitt, he said, had no right to delay the Regency by one day. Parliament had no right to debate anything regarding the Prince of Wales, and the government was merely playing for time. In those few minutes Fox had destroyed the party’s credibility as the defender of parliamentary rights. By so forcefully championing the Prince of Wales he made the party’s battle to limit the powers of the crown appear at best a sham and at worst a sinister plot. There was nothing any of the subsequent Whig speakers could do to lessen the effect of Fox’s speech.*
“The party wish’d they are rid of Charles Fox who was rash and imprudent,” recorded Bess in her journal. “Different opinions, uneasiness etc., at what has past,” wrote Georgiana. “When Sheridan attack[ed] Charles for bring[ing] on debate on Right, Charles said it’s better always to take the bull by the horns. Sheridan said yes but you need not have drove him into the room that you might take him by the horns.” Sheridan was particularly bitter at what he viewed as Fox’s sabotage of his own plans. Two days later, however, he committed an equally disastrous blunder. He began a speech which started out as a conciliatory attempt to smooth over Fox’s mistake, but his bullying tendencies got the better of him and he made a veiled threat about what the Prince might do to those who opposed him. MPs jumped to their feet when they heard this. “I never remember such an uproar as was raised by his threatening us with the danger of provoking the Prince to assert his right,” wrote a witness to the pandemonium.10
The Whigs had destroyed any chance of a smooth passage into office, but rather than follow Pitt’s example and concentrate on tactics they continued to squabble about places. “Great disturbances in the arrangements,” wrote Georgiana on December 12. “The Prince has promised Ld Sandwich to the 1st Ld of the Admiralty and both the Duke of Portland and Charles refuse to have anything to do with it in that case.” Four days later, in this mood of rancour and distrust, the Whigs went down to the House to argue for an unrestricted and immediate Regency. Georgiana was filled with trepidation. The Duke of Richmond had boasted to Bess “that they will beat us. . . . Pitt had caught us on the hook and would keep us to it.” The Prince stayed with her during the debate, “much agitated,” and finally left to get drunk elsewhere. Grey sent her notes on the debate’s progress, but the result, when it came through at four in the morning, was nevertheless a shock: Pitt had won by 268 to 204. Georgiana had suffered from a fierce headache all day, and the news, she said, “did not make me better.” “Fox’s declaration of the Prince of Wales’s right has been of no small service to us,” wrote Pitt’s cousin, William Grenville.11
Pitt sent a curt letter to the Prince a few days later outlining the restrictions he would impose on him: the Prince would have no power to create peerages, and he was debarred from conferring any pensions, honours, or royal posts. As a final insult, the Queen would be in charge of the Royal Household. Georgiana and her friends were indignant at the harsh conditions. Belatedly, Sheridan stayed at home to study the precedents. But it was more than a matter of catching up; Pitt had the measure of his opponents: he knew their weaknesses and their strengths, and the former he took care to play upon while the latter he was not too proud to imitate. Chief among these was the Whigs’ skill in psychological warfare—Georgiana’s field. From the beginning of the crisis she had been energetic in employing the tactics which had so successfully demoralized the government in 1784. “The ladies are as usual at the head of all animosity,” Lord Sydney told Lord Cornwallis, “and are distinguished by caps, ribands, and other such ensigns of party.” Georgiana had designed a fetching headpiece, a “Regency cap,” based on the Prince of Wales’s crest, made up of three jaunty feathers with his motto “Ich Dien” sewn at the base. It caught on to some extent, but Pitt was ready for her this time. The Whigs were dismayed to find the government benches uniformly dressed in “constitutional coats” of blue and red, and they were further discomforted to encounter the majority of people wearing the uniform at public assemblies. The inhabitants of Devonshire House were horrified to discover one morning that its walls were plastered with handbills denouncing Fox and the Prince of Wales.
Pitt realized that Georgiana fulfilled a vital function for the Whig party and he was keen to find an equivalent. He was fortunate in having a candidate who had already put herself forward for the post. “It will not be the first time that a man of great understanding has been the dupe of a designing woman,” wrote Lady Mary Coke disgustedly in 1787, having seen Jane, Duchess of Gordon, at work on Pitt: “The Duchess of Gordon resembles my Lady Bristol [Bess’s mother], is like her in person, manner, contrivances, and like her, scruples nothing to gain her end, such a person must always be dangerous.”12 During the general election of 1780 she had allegedly kidnapped a supporter of Lord Frederick Campbell, who was the candidate in her constituency on the Argyll interest, and kept him locked in the cellar during the canvassing in order to secure the seat for her friend, Captain Elphinstone. Since separating from her husband, the Duchess of Gordon had entered into a semi-public affair with Henry Dundas, Pitt’s best friend and chief political adviser. She was rich, handsome, and a withering opponent in argument. “The Duchess triumphs in a manly mien; Loud is her accent, and her phrase obscene,” was how she was described by a Scottish wit. Her critics regarded her as a political harpy, “a horrid violent woman,” incapable of acting beyond her two chief ambitions—to be the most powerful political hostess in London, and to secure rich husbands for her five daughters.
For the previous two years she had shamelessly imitated Georgiana, holding regular political dinners for Pitt and Dundas, and organizing specifically Tory assemblies to build up a sense of party as a counterbalance to Devonshire House. One observer noted that she was of “Infinite service among the Young Men, holding nightly gatherings of them in Pall Mall.”13 She tried, less successfully, to introduce her own inventions to the fashion world. However, her brashness brought her the rewards she sought: in July 1787 the pro-government Morning Herald reported, “The Duchess of Gordon is now amongst the Ladies most in vogue.”14 Nathaniel Wraxall thought that she was “far inferior to her rival,” lacking Georgiana’s charm or generosity, but that she more than compensated for her deficiencies in personality by her utter ruthlessness. Even Dundas found himself capitulating to her demands for her own candidates to be given preference in Scotland. Once the Regency debates were in progress she did not hesitate to use her influence on the government’s behalf. Wraxall records: “She even acted as a Whipper-in of Ministers. Confiding in her rank, her sex, and personal attractions, she ventured to send for members of Parliament, to question, to remonstrate, and to use every means for confirming their adherence to the government.”15
There is no doubt that the Duchess of Gordon was of considerable help to Pitt. In employing her, he was paying tribute to Georgiana’s success as the doyenne of the Whig party and acknowledging that certain women, at least, possessed the calibre to be leaders of men. It was another example of Pitt combining his opponents’ flair with his genius for method. In contrast, the Whigs squandered their advantages by their internal bickering; there could be no whipping-in to the party line if the leadership could not agree on its content. The Lord Chancellor bluntly told Sheridan that his party were fools to waste Georgiana’s talents; “he said she would have been a powerful indeed almost irresistible advocate.”16 Sheridan replied, according to Georgiana, that they “had had thoughts of employing me,” but it was one more thing on which the le
aders could not agree.
“Really London is now the most odious place I ever was in,” complained Lavinia to George. “Party rage is so high and people all so outrageous and absurd that there is even less comfort in society now than there ever was.”17 The Duchess of Gordon trounced Georgiana’s parties with showy balls which made the Whigs’ thin gatherings seem insipid by comparison. The Prince of Wales asked the Duchess of Gordon to wear a Regency cap, at which she laughed rudely and said “she would sooner be hang’d.”18 In the meantime public opinion supported Pitt. By the middle of January 1789 over forty-five towns had sent public addresses to Parliament praising his leadership. The Whigs fought every restriction imposed on the Regency and lost each debate. “Nothing but treachery going forward—Sheridan heres [sic] Grey has abus’d him, Grey is abus’d by the others,” Georgiana wrote despairingly on January 11; the enmity between Fox and Sheridan was being acted out by their supporters and destroying any hope of a last-ditch rally against Pitt. The Duchess of Gordon invited Georgiana and Bess to accompany her to the House of Commons to listen to the debates, making no attempt to hide her satisfaction at their disappointment. They curtly refused.
By the end of January the only barrier between the Whigs and ignominy was the King’s illness. Fox had given up fighting with Sheridan and the Prince of Wales, and retired to Bath with Mrs. Armistead. In a feeble response to the loyal addresses piling up on Pitt’s desk, the Whigs attempted to organize a public address from the borough of Westminster, but with Portland refusing to talk to Sheridan, and Sheridan ignoring Grey, and Grey still furious with the Prince of Wales, and Fitzpatrick, Loughborough, Craufurd, and Burke nursing their own grievances, the best the party could manage was to send a petition round various public houses. Fewer Whigs bothered to turn up for meetings at Devonshire House despite strenuous efforts by Georgiana to ensure attendance. Lord Malmesbury was among the waverers who received a summons: “Pray come here tomorrow evening any time after 9,” she wrote. “You wd have been more loyal, had you come of yr own accord without being sent to; yr, ever, however, G. Devonshire.”19