Of course, marriages were not made for love. Such a word was beneath their ducal consideration. When the Duke of Portland saw Miss Dallas-Yorke waiting for a train at Worksop station, fell in love with her on sight, and made her his duchess, he was not behaving very ducally. But then she was suitable anyway. Another lucky couple were the Duke and Duchess of Richmond in the eighteenth century, married in their adolescence to satisfy parental debts; they hated each other on sight, but re-met and fell in love two years afterwards. For the most part, marriage was like a move in a chess game, except that the partners were obliged, whether they liked it or not, to produce an heir somehow. Many would have been well advised to follow the example of John Spencer, who, presented with a list of eligible ladies drawn up by his grandmother Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, in alphabetical order, simply pointed to the first on the list beginning with a C, and that was the end of the matter. Her name was Cartaret, they were married, and it worked, in so far as such marketing can work. As long as rank was protected, and money was obtained in sufficient quantities to support that rank, infidelities after marriage were taken for granted. "What's that?" screamed the Duchess. "A painter? What painter? Who ever heard of such a thing? Sylvia Roehampton's daughter to marry a painter? But of course she won't. You marry Tony Wexford and we'll see what can be done about the painter afterwards."13
Double standards like this have protected the ducal families from total imbecility, for, indeed, had they continued to marry each other without the injection of some different blood, it is doubtful that any could have survived as sane humanity. In fact, there were many who were not their father's sons at all; this was tacitly known, accepted, and even applauded, as well it might be. Applauded or not, it is the inevitable result of marriage as a cold business proposition. It was gossip that some of the children of Violet, Duchess of Rutland, were fathered by different men. The Duke of Sutherland is possibly descended from an adulterous liaison which, if anyone cared to think about it or if it were true would deprive him in theory of the dukedom. Jane, Duchess of Gordon, who married three of her daughters to drunken dukes, married the fourth to the heir of Lord Cornwallis, but not without some difficulty. Cornwallis objected to the match because there was said to be madness in the Gordons. The Duchess reassured him: "I understand that you object to my daughter marrying your son on account of the insanity in the Gordon family: now I can solemnly assure you that there is not a single drop of Gordon blood in her veins."14
Lady Anne Foley wrote to her husband: "Dear Richard, I give you joy. I have just made you father of a beautiful boy. Yours etc. P.S. This is not a circular."15
The question of rank has bestirred dukes and duchesses more than anything else, and to a certain extent still does. In a way, they should be counted inferior to earls and barons, who represent much older English aristocracy. Only the marquesses are of more recent import than the dukes. But since the first duke (the Black Prince) was the son of the king, he naturally took precedence over the earls, who were hardly in a position to complain. When the first non-royal duke was created, and he too took precedence over the earls, there were some small stirrings of resentment, but the custom was already established and would have been difficult to overturn. Since then, the dukes have sometimes descended to absurd levels in order to let everyone know their precedence. The Duke of Devonshire thought himself bound to appear at the races with a coach-and-six and twelve outriders, and could scarce contain his fury when Lord Fitzwilliam, of inferior rank, appeared with two coaches and sixteen outriders.16 There have been many arguments as to precedence, on which the House of Lords has been called to decide. The earliest known instance is a dispute between Baron Grey and Baron Beaumont (ancestor of the present Duke of Norfolk) in 1405. Coming up to the twentieth century, the Duke of Manchester displayed no signs that he was conscious of pleasantry when he challenged Prince Willie of Germany to a duel. "I offered to give him suitable reparation in Germany," he said "knowing that my own quarterings were sufficiently high to permit him to fight a duel without loss of prestige."17
In fairness to the dukes, it must be admitted that it was the duchesses, rather than they, who were most preoccupied with precedence. They developed the subtleties of rank to a fine art which, viewed from outside, had all the charm of a stately gavotte, yet all the absurdity of a farce. The Duke of Bedford remembers seeing the Duchess of Buccleuch and the Duchess of Northumberland sidling through the door together in their determination not to give precedence to the other.18 The Duchess of Marlborough, who came from the United States as Consuelo Vanderbilt and had suddenly to learn the intricacies of precedence from one day to the next, said that she was always glad to know her own number in the order so that she would not make a mistake entering or leaving a room out of turn. She once waited at her own dining-room door to allow older women to pass through, and received a furious push from an irate marchioness who loudly claimed that it was just as vulgar to hang back as to leave before one's turn.19 Lady Barrington said to Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, when it was commonly expected that Lady Sarah would marry King George III, "Do, my dear Lady Sarah, let me take the lead and go in before you this once, for you will never have another opportunity of seeing my beautiful back."20 The Duchess of Cleveland reproached an eager young man who tried to help by pulling her servant's bell for her to indicate that luncheon was over. "Sir, officiousness is not politeness," she said very slowly and forcibly.21 Consuelo Vanderbilt attributed this ridiculous behaviour to an "enthroned fetish", and she was probably right, though I suspect boredom played a part. Duchesses had little else to worry about. After she had gained some confidence in this curious Lilliputian world, Consuelo enjoyed mischievously upsetting the applecart, ever so gently, when given the chance. She tells how she observed the Duchess of Buccleuch at a rehearsal in Westminster Abbey for a great
State occasion. The Duchess was "very much aware of the dignity of her rank and position. When our housekeeper, superb in black satin, was ushered to a seat beside her, I viewed with apprehension her surprised reaction; for never could she have supposed that anyone less than a Duchess would share her pew, and vainly did she try to place this new arrival among the twenty-seven ducal families she prided herself on knowing."22
A few years later, at the Coronation of Edward VII, four duchesses were chosen to hold the canopy above Queen Alexandra. Historically, this part of the ceremony was to shield the Queen from public gaze at a time when both King and Queen had to be stripped to the waist for the annointing. Like so much else that is traditional, the cause has gone and the symbol remains. The four ladies were Duchesses of Portland, Marlborough, Montrose and Sutherland, and to avoid complicated fuss, they were referred to in rehearsal as "1, 2, 3 and 4", with no nonsense about dignity.23
Isabella, Duchess of Manchester, took a non-ducal person for her second husband and so difficult did she find the adjustment to a lower rank that she actually petitioned the King to grant him a peerage dignity.24
That station has not entirely disappeared from our system of hierarchies was demonstrated as recently as 1963 when the Queen granted to Mr Grosvenor, heir presumptive to his brother the 4th Duke of Westminster, the rank, style and precedence of the son of a duke, although he was no such thing. A secondary preoccupation for the dukes has been the antiquity of their ancestry, reaching a summit of caprice in the nineteenth century (although the Dukes of Norfolk were already getting into trouble for boasting about their ancestry some 400 years before). It became fashionable for all dukes to be descended from companions of the Conqueror, so they employed subservient genealogists to manufacture family trees which proved such descent. Unhappy with their English surnames, they sought to claim a romantic origin for which there was no real evidence. Thus the Duke of Bedford tried to show that his name Russell was derived from a Norman called "de Rosel", and Seymour, Duke of Somerset, demonstrated that his name was an anglicisation of "St Maur". The Duke of Leinster, whose family was old enough as it was, said a Flore
ntine family called "Gherardini" was the origin of Fitzgerald, the Duke of Manchester that "Monte Acuto" was the ancestor of Montagu. This practice naturally brought genealogy into contempt, since deliberate invention was not excluded as a means to establishing these pedigrees. In fact, only a few of the English dukes can irrefutably trace their lines to the twelfth century, such as Westminster (the Grosvenors), Leinster (the Fitzgeralds), Beaufort (the Somersets), and, through two female digressions, Northumberland (the Percys). Some of the Scottish dukes, like Argyll (the Campbells) and Atholl (the Murrays), are undeniably older still, though shadowy. Nowadays, just as most dukes pay scant attention to who walks first into or out of a room, so many of them know no more about their ancestry than what they can find in Debrett or Burke.
All this is trivial compared with their real monument, achieved almost without trying, which has been to enrich the country's artistic heritage. Dukes have had taste, and the money with which to indulge it; if they lacked taste, they had the money to employ someone with taste to act on their behalf. They paid for the best architects to build their houses, the best painters to paint their portraits. By their patronage, they encouraged the development of the great British architects and painters; with their purchases, they brought to this country the best foreign works of art, from china to furniture to paintings and sculpture. One can argue for weeks whether they should have had so much money; most of them now would say they should not. The point is that they did, and the country as a whole is the beneficiary. At Boughton, Woburn, Chatsworth, Goodwood, and so on, there are incomparable treasures, which no other country can boast, because only here are such treasures used for the purpose for which they were bought, as decor to a home, instead of being ranged against the walls in a museum.
Since Lloyd George first began to bleed the rich, they have, as well as saving their own skins, tried to protect these collections from dispersal or disappearance abroad. The Dukes of Manchester and Newcastle sold everything and left, but they are not typical. The others have adjusted themselves to each new piece of legislation and so far have successfully kept the collections more or less intact. Until recently, it was possible to pass on to one's heir a tax-free inheritance, provided one lived for seven years after the date of the transfer. It has been said that one noble lord died a few weeks too soon, and his family had to leave him in a cold attic room until the time was opportune for them to announce his death officially. Now, with new laws coming into operation, even that ruse will no longer work. There is every possibility that Capital Transfer Tax and Wealth Tax will combine to break up the estates and send our artistic heritage abroad. No one in Britain will be tempted to buy a picture if he knows he will have to pay for it over and over again each year, and not even the dukes will be able to keep those that they have inherited. Perhaps there will soon come a day when there will be nothing left to see at Woburn Abbey and no point in visiting Goodwood. The dukes are not being acquiescent, however. In the van is Lord March, who will one day be Duke of Richmond, constantly emphasising to the public that it is not for himself that he wants the art treasures to remain at Goodwood (living in a remote wing of the house, he hardly sees them), but for the country. He once emptied one whole room to show visitors what might happen when everything was sold abroad.
We may be approaching the end of ducal estates. But not the end of dukes. While it is more or less certain that no new dukedoms will be created, only an Act of Parliament can remove those that already exist. Not even the Queen has the power to declare a dukedom extinct, except by attainder for high treason, and only one candidate, the Duke of Montrose, (see Chapter 14) has come anywhere near making himself so eligible. The crown is the fountain of all honour, and once a dukedom has been created, it can only descend according to limitation of the patent.
Before we embark upon an account of the separate ducal families, a word about the complexities of peerage law for those readers who, like myself, are not naturally familiar with such terms as special remainder or with the seemingly arbitrary use of courtesy titles.
When most titles were created, it was usually stipulated that the dignity would be inherited in tail male, that is with succession to the heirs male of the body of the grantee. This means in effect that the dukedom is inherited by a son, or nephew, or male cousin, or even uncle, as long as he can be traced back in male line to the first duke to hold the title, making him a male descendant of that duke's body. Sometimes the title is limited to heirs general, which means that it can descend through the female line. This is especially true of Scottish earldoms, and accounts for the separation of the dukedom and earldom of Sutherland in 1963, when the dukedom went to the heir male, and the earldom to the heir general, now Countess of Sutherland in her own right. She is still the heir "of the body" of the original Earl of Sutherland. Thirdly, a special remainder can be specified, enabling the title to pass not to a blood descendant, an heir "of the body", but to someone nominated by the grantee. Thus the 1st Duke of Newcastle named his son-in-law, Lord Lincoln, from whom the present Duke is descended, and the new Earl of Northumberland in the Seymour family named his son-in-law, Hugh Smithson, ancestor of the present Duke of Northumberland. A special remainder regulated the descent of the dukedom of Fife, enabling the 1st Duke's daughter to inherit the title in this century. In the case of the Duke of Marlborough, the patent is a most complicated document, listing the male descendants of each of his daughters in succession; the effect was to enable one of his daughters to succeed him, and the son of another daughter to succeed as 3rd Duke.
One more thing. The patent always rules that the heirs, whether male, general, or special, must be "lawfully begotten", two words which have barred many an illegitimate son from succession, and without which we should probably still have a Duke of Bolton now, and would definitely have a different Duke of Somerset from the man presently living at Maiden Bradley.
There is one very special case which is worth mentioning, although it impinges upon a dukedom only by implication. [2] The earldom of Devon was created for Edward Courtenay in 1553, with limitation to heir male, but not of the body. The title was extinct three years later, but in 1831 it was successfully claimed by a man whose descent was from an ancestor living 200 years before the creation of 1553, and who was, quite correctly, a male heir but not a descendant of the 1st Earl. The 17th Earl of Devon is alive today, and benefits from this unique entail.25
The reader will have to bear in mind the use of "courtesy titles" - the Duke of Beaufort may be referred to as Marquess of Worcester, or the Duke of Marlborough as Marquess of Blandford. A duke normally has many subsidiary titles; he is usually, in descending scale, Marquess of this, Earl of that, Viscount of another, and Baron of something else. His eldest son is allowed to use as his style of address the secondary title vested in his father, and his eldest son may take his grandfather's third title. Thus the Duke of Bedford's son is called Lord Tavistock, and his grandson Lord Howland. But neither son nor grandson are in fact peers; they cannot sit in the House of Lords, and there is nothing to prevent their standing for election to the House of Commons. The Duke of Buccleuch was in the House of Commons as an M.P. when he was known as Earl of Dalkeith in his father's lifetime. He was not really an earl, but was able to use his father's earldom "by courtesy" of the sovereign as a mere name.
Conversely, and here we go back to that fascinating topic of rank, the eldest son of a duke is always ranked as a marquess, whether or not his father holds a marquessate which he can use as his name. The son of the Duke of Grafton is called Earl of Euston, but is ranked as a marquess. And the son of the Duke of Somerset who, uniquely among the dukes, has only one subsidiary title at the bottom of the scale - Baron Seymour - is called Lord Seymour yet has the precedence of a marquess above all 199 Earls, 132 Viscounts and 493 barons.
With such sketchy information I trust the tangle of names which follows may be reduced to comparative simplicity.
references
1. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why, pp
. 8-9.
2. Horatia Durant, The Somerset Sequence, p. 77.
3. Complete Peerage, II, App. D.
4. Duke of Sutherland, Looking Back, p. 101.
5. Lord Kinross, The Dukes of England, in Life, 15 November
'19436. Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians, p. 75.
7. Complete Peerage, VIII, App. A, by H. Pirie-Gordon and
A. H. Doubleday.
8. Correspondence of Sarah Spencer, Lady Littelton (1912).
9. Nina Epton, Milord and Milady, p. 27.
10. Duke of Manchester, My Candid Recollections, p. 16.
11. Rosalind K. Marshall, The Days of Duchess Anne, p. 43. [2. Lady Holland to Her Son, p. 102.
13. Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians, p. 159.
14. Augustus Hare, In My Solitary Life, p. 93.
15. Nina Epton, Milord and Milady, p. 208.
16. Creevey Papers, II, 129.
17. Duke of Manchester, My Candid Recollections, p. 233.
18. Duke of Bedford, A Silver-plated Spoon, p. 64.
19. Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, The Glitter and the Gold, p. 83.
20. Life and Letters of Lady Sarah Lennox, (1901), I, p. 92.
21. Augustus Hare, In My Solitary Life, p. 1 o 1.
22. Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, op. cit., p. 98.
23. ibid., 130, and Duke of Portland, op. cit., 129.
24. Complete Peerage, VIII, 374 (d).
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