a proposal of marriage from Lord Palmerston, preferring instead to conduct a liaison with the Duke of Wellington. This relationship with the Iron Duke is her chief claim to fame. A cousin of Wellington's friend Mrs. Arbuthnot, Georgiana too became a close friend of the Duke; however, in later life she claimed the Duke had reneged on a promise to marry her. At that time this was a civil offence; she also threatened to publish the Duke's love letters to her. By the strict Victorian standards of the day this would have been a national scandal. The affair was "hushed up," but a letter exists from the Duke of Wellington to Georgiana's mother urging her "to prevail upon her daughter to cease molesting him with daily vituperative letters." It has also been claimed that Lady Georgiana in fact refused the young future Duke of Wellington's proposal, on the grounds she could not marry so lowly a soldier. Another version of the same story is that Lady Georgiana's father the 10th Earl of Westmorland forbade the marriage of his daughter to an untitled soldier with apparently limited prospects. Both of these stories, however, must be apocryphal, as Lady Georgiana never knew him before he was a "great man". She was born in 1801; Wellington (then Sir Arthur Wellesley) was married in 1806, and was created a duke in 1814. His wife died in 1831. Lady Georgiana began pursuing him some time after that. The Countess died 26 March 1857. Lady Georgiana lived on as the sole châtelaine of Brympton: her bedroom in the North wing retained her name until the 20th century. She altered the house little, but was responsible for the large pond in the garden, and some other improvements in the grounds. She died 4 December 1874, leaving the heavily indebted estate to her nephew the Hon. Spencer Ponsonby, younger son of the 4th Earl of Bessborough The Ponsonby-Fanes Spencer Ponsonby, at the time in Ireland with his elder brother Frederick, escaping a court subpoena for an indiscretion, at first refused to receive the telegram informing him of his inheritance, assuming it was for his elder brother. Indiscretion appears to have been habitual in this family: Lady Caroline Lamb was his aunt. Fane family legend, and most reference books relate that the two brothers cut cards to decide who was to return to face the British courts and the