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![]() During the 1784 election she bravely canvassed the street for Fox, charming Londoners with her common touch. ![]() Georgiana also worked essentially as a campaign manager for Whig candidates. “partys rise and fall-friends be united and disunited-the ties of love give way to caprice, to interest, and to vanity…” Georgiana was, she later wrote, “in the midst of the action,” seeing Constantly brainstorming with her friend, George, Prince of Wales, and political soulmate Charles James Fox, she hosted countless summits at her home. She was also a successful novelist, and an amateur scientist.īut it was Georgiana’s brilliance as a Whig operative that would turn her into a target of the press. She set fashions of the day, developed her own haughty way of speaking, known as the “Cavendish drawl,” and became dear friends with Marie Antoinette, according to Amanda Foreman’s The Duchess. Luckily, she had many talents with which to amuse herself. Georgiana soon found her cold, older husband was not nearly as interested in her as everyone else. Which is indeed a very melancholy truth…had you not been my grandson, you would have been in as bad a condition as you deserve to be.” Fitting words from a woman immortalized by Alexander Pope thusly: I…assure Your Grace that this is the last time I shall ever trouble you by letter or conversation. ![]() Sarah claimed her equally tough granddaughter Anne “ to be burnt,” and she disinherited her grandson Charles, Fifth Earl of Sunderland, which prompted him to write her:Īs for putting me out of your will…I neither expected or desired to be in it. The plan fell through.īut not all her grandchildren were willing to be manipulated by their formidable matriarch. Centuries before the modern Diana and Prince Charles wed, Sarah even attempted to marry her favorite granddaughter-Lady Diana Spencer-to the broke Frederick, Prince of Wales, with a promise of 100,000-pound dowry. A brilliant businesswoman, she became the richest woman in England, according to Field, controlling her Spencer grandchildren with promises of money and power. ![]() Sarah was finally forced to vacate her royal apartments in 1711, but she was not down for the count. A vindictive Sarah became a master propagandist, leaking insinuations about their relationship to the press, and allegedly threatening to blackmail Anne over the contents of their highly charged correspondence. Queen Anne was naturally inclined to support the royalist Tories and was encouraged in these leanings by a new favorite named Abigail. While the second earl would secure the Spencers’ status as political power players for centuries, he was also “cunning, supple shameless” with “a restless and mischievous temper, a cold heart, and an abject spirt.”Īccording to The Favourite: The Life of Sarah Churchill, with Anne’s accession to the throne in 1702 Sarah reached the peak of her power, racking up virtually every important post in Queen Anne’s suite, dictating cabinet appointments, and encouraging the ire of satirists.īut cracks would soon begin to appear. “Nearly 300 years on, my father would talk about him with an ashamed, resigned chuckle,” Charles, Earl Spencer, writes in The Spencers: A Personal History of an English Family of the mercurial family blackguard Robert Spencer (1641-1702). The Survivor: Robert Spencer, Second Earl of Sunderland Clever, charming, and fiery, much like Diana, her ancestors learned how to play the royal game-and then ripped up the rule book. This legacy stretches to the 14th century, with their disputed ancestor Hugh Despenser’s alleged torrid affair with King Edward II and Despenser’s eventual brutal execution. Indeed, the role of the aristocratic family of Diana, Princess of Wales, for centuries has been that of royal disrupter. “The Spencers are difficult,” Elizabeth, the Queen Mother once observed to a friend, according to Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles.
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