I could light my pipe at her eyes

Ian Gilmour

• Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman
  HarperCollins, 320 pp, £19.99, May 1998, ISBN 0 00 255668 5
• Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain by K.D. Reynolds
  Oxford, 268 pp, £35.00, April 1998, ISBN 0 19 820727 1
• Lady Byron and Earl Shilton by David Herbert
  Hinckley Museum, 128 pp, £7.50, March 1998, ISBN 9952 1 4713 9

Some body said of the 18th-century Spencers that the Bible was always on the table – and the cards in the drawer. Certainly, that was true of the first Countess Spencer, mother of Georgiana and Harriet. She was conspicuously religious and a compulsive gambler. Up at 5.30 in the morning, she spent an hour at her prayers and a further hour with her Bible. The evenings were spent more congenially, at the gaming table. ‘I staid ’till one hour past twelve,’ Harriet wrote in her diary as a child, ‘but Mama remained ’till six in the morning’ – which presumably curtailed Mama’s devotions that day. She effectively taught her children to gamble. ‘I can never make myself easy,’ she later wrote to Georgiana, ‘about the bad example I have set you, and what you have but too faithfully imitated.’