H l.l.l K|
FREDERICK MULLER
London Sydney Auckland Johannesburg
For CAROLINE
and for FREDERICK
© Brian Masters 1975, 1977, 1980, 1988 All rights reserved
First published in Great Britain in 1975 by Blond & Briggs Ltd. Second impression with additional material 1977
This revised and updated edition first published in Great Britain in 1988 by Frederick Muller, an imprint of
Century Hutchinson Ltd, Brookmount House, 62-65 Ghandos Place, London WC2N 4NW
Century Hutchinson Australia Pty Ltd
PO Box 496, 16-22 Church Street, Hawthorn, Victoria 3122, Australia
Century Hutchinson New Zealand Limited
PO Box 40-086, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Century Hutchinson South Africa (Pty) Ltd PO Box 337, Bergvlei, 2021 South Africa
isbn o 09 173700 i
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Masters, Brian, 1939-
The dukes: the origins, ennoblement
and history of 26 families. 3rd ed.
1. Great Britain, dukes to 1985
I. Title
3°5-5'223
isbn 0-09-173700-1
Contents
Acknowledgements
Mr E. K. Timings, m.a., f.s.a., Principal Assistant Keeper of the Public Record Office, has assiduously read every word of the MS and has made many helpful suggestions; I should like his contribution to the book which follows to be acknowledged first. Lady Camilla Osborne has substantially helped to track down some details of fact which have proved most useful, and undertook the task of proofreading, for which I am deeply grateful. I wish particularly to mention Miss Stevenson of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Miss Evans and Miss Wimbush of the National Portrait Gallery, Miss Frankland of Ladbrokes Ltd, and Mr J. M. Keyworth of the Second Covent Garden Property Co. Ltd, all of whom have remained most helpful in spite of constant enquiries. The staff of the London Library are unfailingly obliging.
I am grateful to the Duke of Devonshire for permission to consult the papers in the Devonshire Collections, and to his librarian T. S. Wragg, m.b.e., t.d., for his guidance through them; also to the Duke of Atholl, who allowed me to consult his family papers at Blair Castle, to the Duke of Hamilton, for permission to see the Hamilton Papers currently being catalogued at the Scottish National Register of Archives, and to the Marquess of Londonderry, for permission to see the Londonderry Papers at Durham County Record Office. The Duke of Buccleuch and the Duke of Newcastle have both kindly involved themselves in lengthy correspondence with the author.
Those who have been personally very helpful with information include the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Richmond, the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, the Duke of St Albans, the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Hamilton, the Duke of Argyll, the Duke of Atholl, the Duke of Northumberland, k.g., the Marquess of Tavistock, the Marquess of Kildare, the Countess of Sutherland, and Mr Charles Janson. To all I should like here to express my gratitude.
For allowing me to take their time and plunder their knowledge I am indebted to Francis W. Steer, m.a., f.s.a., archivist to the Duke of Norfolk; J. N. R. James, Esq., Managing Trustee of the Grosvenor Estates; Michael Hanson, Esq.; and those descendants of the Duke of Somerset in the St Maur line - Mr Edward St Maur, Mr Joseph Hoare, and Mrs G. Kemmis-Betty.
Permission to use photographs of pictures in public collections and in private hands is gratefully acknowledged with each illustration, and due credit is likewise recorded to the photographers. I am also happy to record my thanks to various authors who have allowed me to quote from their works, specified in reference notes at the end of each chapter, and I trust they will accept this collective appreciation. Mrs Cecil Woodham-Smith in particular has been most generous in allowing me the freedom of her personal library.
The patience and industry of Mrs Diana Steer, who typed the manuscript, deserve to be recorded in rose-banks, and the generosity of the Marquess of Londonderry, who enabled me to write the final draft at his home in Co. Cleveland in the most peaceful conditions, is something for which gratitude seems woefully inadequate.
B.M.
Wynyard, 1975Preface to 1988 Edition
In 1972 Anthony Blond made a bold suggestion. There had never, he said, been a book devoted to the history of all surviving dukedoms following each family from the date of creation to the present day in one volume. Many dukes were well known to history because they had been Prime Minister, or had won famous battles, or had distinguished themselves in some other way in the service of their country. A few were known for their slightly dotty personalities. There remained scores of other dukes whose lives languished unexamined in archive rooms and who perhaps deserved to be restored to their place in the genetic flow. Blond invited me to undertake the task of putting them all together and tracing family characteristics which persisted, sometimes obliquely, through many generations, and I spent the next three years in a gloriously eclectic ramble through five hundred years of history. Though intended to be informative and entertaining, The Dukes has, since it first appeared in 1975, earned a gratifying reputation as a work of reference. It is for this reason that the reader might like to be acquainted with events which have occurred since the main text was published twelve years ago. The second edition of 1980 made some amendments in added footnotes; in some cases these too are out of date and have required revision. There are still twenty-six dukes (who will reduce to twenty-four in the next generation), but we now have a new Duke of Somerset, a new Duke of Beaufort, a new Duke of Portland, and a new Duke of Manchester. The young Duke of Roxburghe now has an infant son and heir (Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford), while his almost as young brother-in-law the Duke of Westminster still has not; until that day comes, he will remain potentially the last duke of the Grosvenor family. Furthermore, Elizabeth II's son Prince Andrew was created Duke of York one hour after his marriage to Sarah Ferguson in 1986. As a royal duke, he is without the scope of this book, although his grandson will fall within it when he inherits the title seventy or eighty years from now; even so, he has a tangential relevance in that he is reported to have proposed marriage to Miss Ferguson while staying at Floors Castle with the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. HRH The Duke of York may also justly be credited with an encouraging influence over the pages which follow, as the enthusiasm generated by his wedding kindled a whole new interest in the subject of dukes, their descent and their position in the land.
The twenty-six non-royal dukes are still working, ruminating, managing estates and avoiding attention much as before. They share, for the most part, an ineradicable shyness, of which there are many extravagant examples in the pages that follow, and prefer not to be noticed by any save their family, and dependants. Some succeed better than others. The Duke of Devonshire is constantly in the news, much to his chagrin, not only because he has embraced the responsibilities attendant upon his station by accepting onerous public duties, but because the Duchess's formidable family (the Mitfords) has been the subject of half a dozen books in the last twelve years as well as a musical stage version of their early years together. There is, of course, nothing a Duchess can do to deflect fame of this sort; it is the penalty of having a clutch of uncommon sisters. She has herself written a history of Chatsworth, called The House, which is quite the most entertaining account so far written, and incidentally has revealed her to be as gifted with words as her sisters Nancy, Jessica and Diana. For his part, the duke has achieved the impossible by securing the future of Chatsworth for generations to come in the face of mountains of legislation designed to prevent landowners passing on anything at all. That will be his enduring accomplishment, and one of which he will have every right to be proud.
The
Duke of Rutland has won a long battle to deter prospectors from undermining Belvoir Castle and destroying one of the last oases of pristine beauty in the country, earning the gratitude of people who live there if not that of people who think progress a virtue whatever the cost. The Duke of St Albans, living in the south of France, has been gratified to watch his grandson Lord Vere, a student at Hertford College, Oxford, grow towards a sharing of his own conviction (supported by some academics) that the family is descended from the man who really wrote Shakespeare's plays - the last de Vere Earl of Oxford. We may expect to see a resurrection of this literary mystery when he eventually becomes Duke.
The heir to the Duke of Fife, Lord Macduff, has adopted the ducal style well ahead of time. Working in the City of London, he has been known to strike an assembled company of stockbrokers with awe at his approach. There is something still to be said for the view I first promulgated twelve years ago, that when one is in the presence of a duke one is aware that he is set apart from other members of the nobility - a giant in the magnificence of his ancestry, in the splendour of his genetic luggage, in the distinction of his manner. It is no accident that dukes take precedence over government ministers, envoys and bishops.
Brian Masters London,1988
Introduction
The title of duke is the rarest honour which the Crown may bestow on a person not of royal blood. It is next to the Crown itself in degree,[1] above every other subject in the realm, including those who hold dignities of much greater antiquity in the peerage, such as earls and barons, in existence long before the first duke was created 651 years ago. They are addressed officially by the monarch as "right trusty and entirely beloved cousins", and by everyone else as "Your Grace". They are the only peers whose title cannot be disguised by a generic style of address; whereas the Marquess of Anglesey, the Earl of Lichfield, Viscount Cowdray and Baron Teviot are levelled to the same degree in conversation as "Lord Anglesey", "Lord Lichfield", "Lord Cowdray", and "Lord Teviot", a duke is never a lord, always the "Duke of Such-and-such", and they would address each other, unless they were related or close, as "Duke". Their special status has allowed them to preserve an aura which even today can make the rest of us if not tremble at least defer with some inherited sense of hierarchy. The aura is now all that is left of the privileges attached to a dukedom, once so extensive as to paralyse the imagination. They are not even all aristocrats any more. None, it is true, can claim to have emerged from the working class; there have been no trade-union dukedoms created in the twentieth century, nor even any granted to the get-rich-quick boys in the property world. Some of the dukes, however, have a trickle of workmen's blood in their veins, due to some bizarre marriages in the past, and of the twenty-six still going, half a dozen are invincibly middle-class.
In common with other peers until the reforms of the nineteenth century, the dukes enjoyed privileges which seem scarcely credible. They were above the law. They could commit crime and escape the jurisdiction of the courts; no one could arrest them; they could run up debts to infinity without punishment; they had control of Parliament, many seats in the House of Commons being within the gift of a handful of noblemen, especially the dukes; they were the government of the land, in fact if not in appearance; they were England. "Flattered, adulated, deferred to, with incomes enormously increased by the Industrial Revolution, and as yet untaxed, all- powerful over a tenantry as yet unenfranchised, subject to no ordinary laws, holding the government of the country firmly in their hands and wielding through their closely-knit connections an unchallengeable social power, the milords of England were the astonishment and admiration of Europe."1
All this has thankfully gone. There is not a duke alive today who would wish for a return of such subservience or would attempt to justify such power. Gone, too, are some of the more absurd accoutrements of a ducal life - the personal trumpeter to announce one's presence, the retinue of personal servants, sometimes well over a hundred individuals, the pomposity of privilege. The modern dukes would not dare indulge in the antics of their forbears - requiring other people to wind their watches for them, or to hand them their dinner-plates wearing white kid gloves - for fear of being laughed to scorn. Yet some such habits have continued until within the last twenty years. The late Duke of Portland could talk of having bought a Rolls-Royce "off the peg" in Newcastle without the consciousness of humour. Many of the houses in which dukes live still have a personal staff of up to twenty persons, including cooks, butler, valet, "nanny", and chars, although such a staff no longer makes them singular - foreign ambassadors from communist countries can employ more.
Twenty of the dukes live in beautiful houses built at a time when the English aesthetic sense was at its most developed, houses far too big for them, in parks and grounds of ravishing beauty. One has chosen a nomadic life - the Duke of Bedford; two have exiled themselves to Africa - Manchester and Montrose; one lives in a flat in Monte Carlo - Duke of St Albans, and another in a house in Lymington - Duke of Newcastle; the late Duke of Leinster used to rent a room in Hove. Of the others, nine own more land than the Queen. The Crown estates have about 1,800,000 acres, which the Queen surrenders to the State in return for the Civil List, money she needs to run the royal households. As a private landowner, the Queen has only 40,000 acres at Balmoral and 7000 acres at Sandringham. In contrast, the Duke of Buccleuch has 250,000 acres, the Duke of Atholl 120,000, the Dukes of Northumberland and Argyll 80,000 each, and the Duke of Westminster owns a quarter of central London. The dukes have off-loaded thousands of acres since World War I, but what they have left is worth as much as it ever was, with the rise in agricultural land values. On paper at least, nearly all of them are millionaires in terms of their assets. As for cash in hand it is quite another story.
Before the beginning of the twentieth century the cost of being a duke, of maintaining the estate to the benefit of all tenants, of living in the lavish style which was expected of a duke, was prohibitive. The Marquess of Worcester, grandfather to the 1st Duke of Beaufort, wrote : "Since I was a Marquess I am worse by one hundred thousand pounds, and if I should be a duke, I should be an arrant beggar."2 To obviate such noble penury, it was customary when creating a duke to give him money enough to live like one; the honour was hollow without the cash. Nowadays the running of an estate is so complex an affair, with farm economics and legislation, that it is above the heads of most dukes, who have therefore handed over the management of their affairs to a Board of Trustees, with expert advice from businessmen, and accept in return an allowance from the estate. The landowning duke can no longer afford to be a dilettante; he must be professional or sink. The most successful estates are those wherein the Duke has accepted his new role as Chairman of the Trustees. In the case of Bedford, the Duke made a success of the Woburn estates in spite of advice from the trustees; he proved himself, in effect, a better manager than they, though at the cost of methods not universally applauded.
Other shadows of privileges which they still retain include the likelihood of being considered for one of the great Offices of State. The Earl Marshalship has been hereditary in the House of Howard since 1672, but the office of Lord Steward, merged with the Crown since Henry IV, is appointed pro hac vice by the Sovereign. The current Steward is the Duke of Northumberland. The office originally consisted in placing the dishes on the lord's table at solemn feasts ("and cleaning out the fireplace, I think," said the Duke), but now it consists in announcing the Queen's guests on Great State Occasions. The Royal House of Stuart derived its name from the hereditary tenure of this office in Scotland, as the Butlers (Earls and Marquesses of Ormonde) were originally butlers to the monarch of Ireland.8
Dukes have always been high in the list of Knights of the Garter, the family of the Duke of Norfolk providing no less than twenty-four members (or thirty-five if you count the allied branches of Mowbray and Fitzalan as well as the Howards), closely followed by the family of Cavendish. Of the eleven Dukes of Devonshire in this family, the
fi
rst ten all had the Garter. Today, three dukes are K.G. - Grafton, Northumberland, and Norfolk.
All dukes have the right to a coronet, on which are eight gold strawberry leaves, and a cape edged with stoat with black tails. Only on great State occasions, such as a Coronation, are these items now removed from the wardrobe, and a few of the dukes don't have them at all and are obliged to hire them. Even they may retain the favour of being addressed as "Your Grace", but some prefer to discourage it. A little boy was introduced to the Duke of Sutherland, whom he addressed as "Sir", to the consternation of his proud father, who dug him in the ribs and loudly whispered "Your Grace"; the boy looked the Duke in the eye and said, "For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful."4
More often than not, while the privileges have been eroded, the responsibilities for which they were in some way a recompense have remained. Not that these responsibilities extend to an active involvement in governing the country; only Buccleuch, Portland, and Devonshire have held political office, the first two before they came to the title. There was a time when almost every duke was in politics; the Russells (Dukes of Bedford) have had a connection with the House of Commons for nearly 500 years, and the Cavendishes (Dukes of Devonshire) have always been political, from a sense of duty rather than predilection, as a natural return for the privilege of rank. The last duke to be Prime Minister was Wellington in 1828, but before him there were the Duke of Portland (1783 and 1807-9), the Duke of Grafton (11767-70), the Duke of Newcastle (1754-6 and 1757—62) and the Duke of Devonshire for eight months from November 1756 to July 1757.
The responsibilities that have remained are those of a landowner towards his tenantry, and towards the house in which he lives, often so beautiful as to be a national monument but to which the nation pays no contribution, towards the inheritance of which he is the guardian. A few have abnegated and abandoned their estate, not without reason, for they did not ask to be born to such responsibilities, and undeniably find life easier without them. They prefer to construct their own future. Most, however, hang on in the face of public misunderstanding and political prejudice, knowing that some dark force, as strong as the blood in their veins, commands them to do their best for the estate which they have been given. They are "men with few of the average man's opportunities, men who cannot rise but can only descend in the social scale, men condemned to eternal publicity, whose private lives are seldom their own. Men who may live only where their grandfathers have chosen and where the public expects. Men hamstrung by an inherited amateur status, to whom barely a profession is open. Men limited by the responsibilities of too large an income."5 Some, like the Duke of Richmond, have successfully overcome the disadvantage of title by seeking the "average man's opportunities" as an average man: he worked on the factory floor to learn about engineering, then learned business techniques to make his Goodwood estate self-sufficient, with the result that his experience transcends all class divisions. Others, like the Duke of Somerset, have managed somehow to live a private life in a small country house without anyone appearing to realise that he exists.
The Dukes Page 1