The Dukes

by Brian Masters

  Many dukes, however, like Sebastian in The Edwardians, have simply to face the limitations of their position : "Sebastian, condemned by the very circumstance of his situation to be nothing more, ever, than a commonplace young man; as commonplace as a king; for even his rebellions, were he to rebel, must be on ordained lines; there was nothing for him to rebel against, except his own good fortune, and that was a thing he could never evade ... all these things were tied on to him like so many tin cans to the tail of a poor cat. With them went the romance of his whole make-up. Poor Sebastian, condemned to be romantic; condemned always to be romantically commonplace! What were the wild oats of such a young man? An inevitable crop, sown by his bad godmother at his christening. Not sown even by his own hand, but anticipated on his behalf. Poor Sebastian, his traditions were not only inherited, they were also prophetic. They stretched both ways. It was an unfair handicap."8

  The large country estate, with the house as its pivot, was (and is) a peculiarly English affair. In many ways it was a perfect example in miniature of the welfare state, self-sufficient and self-protecting, with every member of the "family", from shepherds to carpenters to kitchen-maids, provided for from cradle to grave. Of course, it was capricious, depending as it did upon the personality of the Duke at its centre; should he choose to be mean (the nineteenth-century Duke of Newcastle springs to mind), the mini-welfare state collapsed. For the most part, however, people who lived on these estates had their births, clothes, education, health, weddings and funerals paid for.

  Where, anyway, has this handful of families come from? What makes their status so special? In the first place, there have always been very few of them. The title of duke is granted the least often. Now there are twenty-six, but there have been times when there were only two or three. The most there has been at one time was forty, at the end of George I's reign, descending to thirty-one by 1930. Two or three more are likely to be extinct by the end of the century, reducing the total to twenty-three. There have been none (except royal) created since 1900, and there are not likely to be any more.

  The first dukedom in England was created in 1337, when Edward III made his son the Black Prince Duke of Cornwall. This is now hereditary in the heir to the throne. Shortly afterwards the dukedom of Lancaster was also merged with the throne. The title of duke is not indigenous in England. In the Roman Empire there had been the dux, a leader or general, whence our word derives through the French due, which came to us with the Conquest. The Norman kings styled them­selves Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine in France, and were understandably jealous of creating a title in England equal in rank to one of their own. So 270 years had to pass before the first English­man became a duke in 1337, and he was of royal blood. A dukedom of Suffolk was twice created, in 1448 and 1514, and Richard II created six dukes in one day, on 29th September 1397, but none survived two years. The first non-royal duke to last was Norfolk in 1473, followed by Somerset, bestowed by Edward Seymour upon himself in 1547 in the name of his ward, the infant King Edward VI. Thereafter, the title was so rarely granted, and so regularly pruned by beheadings and attainders, that there were no dukes at all in England for thirty years after the execution of the Duke of Norfolk in 1572 (and no non-royal dukes for even longer).

  Dukedoms proliferated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dwindling to a handful of fresh creations in the nineteenth. The oldest of these is Hamilton, created by Charles I in 1643, and the prize for quantity must go to Charles II, who created twenty-six dukes, including five nephews, two mistresses, and six bastard sons as well as the unrelated Duke of Beaufort. Five of his creations survive. Of the others which continue today, William and Mary are responsible for Bedford (1694), Devonshire (1694) and Argyll (1701). Queen Anne created Marlborough (1702), Rutland (1703), Atholl (1703), Montrose (1707), Roxburghe (1707), and Brandon (1711); George I created Portland (1716) and Manchester (1719); George II, Newcastle (1756). The Dukes of Northumberland and Leinster were both created in 1766 by George III, who honoured Wellington in 1814. William IV created only one duke, Sutherland in 1833, while Queen Victoria introduced four new creations, Abercorn (1868), Westminster (1874), Gordon (11876) and Fife (1889), plus two duplications in Argyll (1892) and Fife again (1900). It is common knowledge that Winston Churchill was offered a dukedom by the present Queen, but respectfully declined.

  In all, less than 500 individuals have had the right to call them­selves Duke (or suo jure Duchess) in the 651 years since the first creation.7

  The titles chosen do not always bear a close relation to the county or town where the grantee lives or holds land. The Duke of Devon­shire, for example, has no landholding in Devon, but 72,000 acres in Derbyshire. The Duke of Norfolk has property in Sheffield and land in Sussex and Yorkshire, but precious little in Norfolk. The Duke of Richmond's land is in Sussex, and the Duke of Rutland's in Nottinghamshire. The Duke of St Albans had nothing to do with the town of that name, and the Duke of Sutherland owns not an acre in that county. The Duke of Manchester has hardly been near Manchester. On the other hand, the Dukes of Northumberland, Bedford, Argyll, Atholl, Roxburghe, are all firmly seated in the counties from which they take their titles, and Westminster in the City which his ancestors made so elegant.

  Further complications arise when you consider that there is not one peerage system into which these twenty-six individuals fit, but five. There used to be just three separate peerages - of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland - until the union of England and Scotland in 1707, forming Great Britain and establishing peers of that new entity, and then the union of Great Britain and Ireland, forming the United Kingdom in 1801, giving us a fifth peerage. It may help to have a list showing how the dukes divide :

  Dukes of England

  Norfolk

  (1483)

  Somerset

  (1547)

  Richmond

  (1675)

  Grafton

  (1675)

  Beaufort

  (1682)

  St Albans

  (1684)

  Bedford

  (1694)

  Devonshire

  (1694)

  Marlborough

  (1702)

  Rutland

  (1703)

  Dukes of Scotland

  Hamilton

  (1643)

  Buccleuch

  (1663)

  Argyll (1701)

  Atholl (1703)

  Montrose (1707)

  Roxburghe (1707)

  ( plus Lennox, 1675, and Queensberry, 1684, held respectively by the Dukes of Richmond and Buccleuch).

  Dukes of Great Britain

  Portland (1716)

  Manchester (1719)

  Newcastle (1756

  Northumberland (1766

  (plus Brandon, 1711, held by the Duke of Hamilton).

  Dukes of Ireland

  Leinster (1766)

  Abercorn (1868)

  Dukes of the United Kingdom

  Wellington (1814)

  Sutherland (1833)

  Westminster (1874)(

  Fife (1900)

  (plus Gordon, 1876, held by the Duke of Richmond, and Argyll, 1892, held by the already Scottish Duke of Argyll).

  This list is also useful in so far as it reproduces the strict order of precedence of the dukes, in the pyramid of hierarchy in England at the peak of which sits the Queen. Above the dukes are only five male members of the Royal Family in direct line of succession, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Prime Minister, Lord High Chancellor, Lord President of the Council, Speaker of the House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal, and High Commissioners and ambassadors. The question of precedence has given much vexation to the duchesses (most of the dukes could not give a damn), and, as we shall see, has provided entertaining fun and games over the years. As dukes of England take precedence above dukes of all four other peerages, the Duke of Rutland goes before the Duke of Hamilton, whose title is older and whose pride, in the last 200 years, has been more easily injured. It also means t
hat the Duke of Abercorn, whose family has not been particularly active, takes precedence above Wellington, the saviour of his country, and whose title is older by some fifty years, because Abercorn's dukedom is in the peerage of Ireland, and Wellington's only in the peerage of the United Kingdom.

  It is a commonplace that dukes are boring. "How dull! Bless me! We are eleven of us, Dukes and Duchesses, and most dukefully dull we are," wrote Sarah Spencer when she accompanied Queen Victoria on a visit to Woburn Abbey in 1841.8 That may have been true in the presence of the Queen, but they must all have been behaving quite out of character. Some of the dukes and duchesses who fill these pages are for the most part, supremely un-dull, they are bizarre, intransigent, naively selfish, eccentric, monumentally self-confident, and with a strong streak of delinquency in their natures. They are the kind of people who, placed on stage in a modern play, would have to be written down to be made credible. Of course there are exceptions - there have been and still are, shy dukes whose ancestors have used up all the self-confidence in the family genes and left none for them; there have been some who were malleable, ordinary - but it is tedious to qualify with exceptions all the time, and one is justified in attempting certain common characteristics, shared by most dukes at one time or another.

  Their delinquency has enabled them to plunge indomitably through life with no regard for anything but the expression of their large personalities, with no need to question motives, and in the knowledge that no one will ask them to explain themselves. They do not look over their shoulders, nor even to the side, nor do they make allowances; they do not need to cultivate imagination - that is for others. With self-confidence as their shield, they can be rude, downright, rough, interfering, frank. They say what they mean and mean what they say. They can be sulky and critical, obedient to moods rather than opinions, moods of sweeping intensity and terrifying instability. They are easily irritated, and do not flinch from showing it. If they wanted to spit, they spat; duchesses could scratch their backs, and dukes their crutches, with impunity, because there was no one to tell them not to. This is not to say that dukes behave as boorishly as this paragraph suggests, but it does mean that the streak of impudence, of let's-see-what-we-can-get-away-with prankishness, and of sheer block- bustering obduracy, are strong enough in the inheritance for them to be tempted to respond in like manner, and for one to catch glimpses in them of ancestral arrogance.

  What else ? There is a rich vein of lunacy in many a ducal house.

  I know that there is plenty of evidence of madness among dustmen or stockbrokers, and do not wish to labour the point, but when you consider that there have been mentally unstable people in the families of Howard (Dukes of Norfolk), Beauclerk (Dukes of St Albans), Hamilton (which affects the Dukes of Hamilton and Dukes of Abercorn), Murray (Dukes of Atholl), Fitzgerald (Dukes of Leinster), Cavendish-Bentinck (Dukes of Portland), Russell (Dukes of Bedford), and most recently Grosvenor (Dukes of Westminster), you see that over a third of the ducal families have borne the taint, and some descendants may still do. Of the other two-thirds, almost all have produced at least one duke whose eccentricities were so bizarre as to make his sanity questionable. I think it is safe to say that this is somewhat above the national average, and must bear some examination. The simplest explanation lies in persistent intermar­riage, but I suspect there is a less demonstrable cause in that delinquency mentioned earlier, in the pure self-indulgence in which dukes have always been encouraged and which occasionally has toppled over the edge of civilised normality. Left to do as we please, we would all indulge those whimsical fantasies we privately nurture, and when we found that no one was there to contain us, we could with ease release ourselves totally from reality. This is what happened to the 5th Duke of Portland, and to many of the Dukes of Bedford. With others, however, the imbecility has been medical in character.

  On the other hand, the mysteries of genetic inheritance are such that intermarriage between relations can often be beneficial, by preserving and repeating a strain of especial brilliance, or, even better, by combining two such strains which are themselves the product of four previous brilliant people. The result is that the number of remarkable men and women produced by ducal families is also far in excess of the national average. There are, for instance, no ordinary Russells; they have either been brilliant politicians, splendid speakers, stylish writers, or something has gone wrong and they have turned out bizarre and eccentric. The Cavendish family has produced scores of men with splendid intelligence and wisdom, with political sagacity, or simply with style. There is more than a fair share of great people among the Churchills, the Howards, the Grosvenors, and the Percys, while the family of the Duke of Richmond, producing one admirable person after another in almost unbroken succession, is practically an advertisement for the benefits of keeping marriage within a small circle of proven ability.

  Reserve is another common characteristic of only recent evolution. Over the last 150 years it has become the norm for dukes decently to abstain from publicity. The rule has taken some hard knocks from the Duke of Bedford, the late Duke of Leinster, and the late Duke of Argyll, but otherwise a "low profile" is still generally observed.

  Some dukes, while dispensing tremendous generosity to tenants and dependants, have been curiously mean to family and friends. For this I can find no explanation, but it occurs frequently enough, in up to half the ducal families, to warrant notice. No one can surpass the Dukes of Marlborough in this respect, while it has happened so often in the Dukes of Somerset that the present Duke has been left with only the bricks and mortar of his ancestral home, the rest of his inheritance having been hived off or dispersed by his ancestors. "What will you do with your money when you die?" a friend asked a miserly nobleman. "You have no children and you can't take it with you, and if you could it would melt."9

  Heirs to a dukedom were generally educated to a spartan life, with appalling nursery food, and little, if any, parental affection. This was supposed to teach them self-reliance, but more often it had the effect of breeding those eccentricities which the adult developed in seeking to gratify all those desires denied him in infancy. One Duke of Manchester, for example, was fed on porridge for breakfast, bullock's heart and potatoes for lunch, bread and milk for tea.10 Is it any wonder he should grow into a selfish luxuriant? The 1st Duke of Hamilton in adulthood slept every night in nightshirt, nightcap, bedsocks and night cravat, in a red damask bed heated by a warming-pan. "He slept on the suffocating softness of a feather mattress, between linen sheets, beneath anything from two to six pairs of blankets and two or three quilts. He slept in a propped-up position on bolsters and pillows, and of course he slept with the curtains of his bed pulled tightly shut."11 There was also a coal fire burning in the bedroom, all of which might seem absurd until one remembers that the Duke was probably over-compensating for a childhood in which he all but froze to death.

  Nor were the heirs told, in some cases, what lay in their future. The present Duke of Bedford had no idea he was related to the then Duke, let alone that he was his eventual heir, until a maid told him when he was sixteen. (He had never been to school, and so had escaped exposure to the teasing of friends, which would have revealed the truth of his position.) The present Duke of Newcastle admits that the fact he might one day be a duke was never discussed in the family and he never gave it a thought. In contrast, when the heir has been a distant cousin long since divorced from the main line of descent ("what we tactfully call a kinsman," says the Duke of Somerset), he and his family seem to have thought of little else. Such was the case with the Duke of St Albans, who had always been made conscious that he stood a chance of inheriting the dukedom, although a substantial genealogical detour was necessary for him to do so.

  Two obsessions have united all ducal families without exception, at least up to World War I, and in some cases beyond it - marriage and rank, and the former was merely a way of ensuring that the latter was maintained. Marriage dominated the conversation of duchesses for two centuries.
That the heir to a dukedom should marry went without saying; it would be fantasy to suggest otherwise. If he didn't care for women, tant pis, he must grit the stone between his teeth and get on with it. Whom he should marry was the abiding question. It ought to be the daughter of another duke, so that rank would not be diluted, and more often than not it was. The Duchess of Baden visited England in 1829 in order to find a husband for her daughter. She had eyes on the Duke of Buccleuch, but hesitated because he had only three dukedoms, which she erroneously supposed would go to the first three sons of the marriage, while the fourth would have no alternative but to go into the Church.12 Occasionally an earl's daugh­ter would insinuate herself into this private club and become a duchess, and even less frequently an untitled lady, or buzz buzz, a foreigner. The result of this vast incestuous dance, with dukes only marrying other dukes' daughters, to whom they were probably related in some way already, is that today all twenty-six dukes are related to each other. Some are now distant, but a quarter of them, even today, are close relatives, brothers-in-law, uncles, cousins to each other.