He was a tireless campaigner for the reform of abuses in government, always ferretting, always posing awkward questions. He wanted the Civil List, which he thought wasteful and lavish to a shameful degree, to be severely cut. That proposal, too, was defeated.
On the matter of American independence, Richmond was again more to the left than any other nobleman. He said that the resistance of the colonists was "neither treason nor rebellion, but is perfectly justifiable in every possible political and moral sense". It is no wonder that he terrified his political colleagues with such pronouncements, and alienated public opinion. One M.P. said that if there were two Dukes of Richmond in the country he would not live in it.126 George III is reported to have said "there was no man in his dominions by whom he had been so much offended, and no man to whom he was so much indebted, as the Duke of Richmond".127
His personal integrity and high-minded fight against abuses were so far beyond question that he retained the guarded affection of even those who could not stomach his views. He was not a man to bear grudges, though his austerity and tactlessness sometimes gave the opposite impression.128 His one fault was to be pompously pleased with his own rectitude. Still, Walpole trumpeted his unequalled honour, said he was one of the virtuous few, and incapable of an unworthy action. "I worship his thousand virtues beyond any man's", he wrote.
"He is intrepid and tender, inflexible and humane beyond example. I do not know which is most amiable, his heart or his conscience. He ought too to be the great model to all our factions. No difference in sentiments between him and his friends makes the slightest impression upon his attachment to them."129
One other achievement was to open the first ever School of Antique Sculpture in England, financed by the Duke and housed in his Whitehall home, as early as 1758, some ten years before the foundation of the Royal Academy.
Richmond married Lady Mary Bruce, a descendant of Robert Bruce, but she died without issue. By his housekeeper, Mrs Bennett, he had three daughters, to whom he left £50,000 each, and another daughter by a Miss Le Clerc.
His successor, the 4th Duke (1764-1819), was his nephew. Once more, whatever references one can find testify to the inherent good nature of this agreeable family. Sir Robert Peel wrote : "I never knew a man of whom it could be said with so much justice that he was always anxious to find an excuse for the misconduct of his friends, and to put the most charitable construction on the acts of every human being."130 It is probably true to say that Charles II is more faithfully represented in the Dukes of Richmond than in any of his other descendants. They carry the King's happy disposition in their posterity, his good companionship, his soft nature.
The 4th Duke inherited the family's good looks ("the finest formed man in England"),131 and married Charlotte, daughter of the Duke of Gordon. This was the Duchess who gave the most famous party in history, the so-called "Waterloo Ball" on 15th June 1815, at a coach- maker's depot decorated to look like a ballroom, in the rue de la Blanchisserie in Brussels. It was the night before the Battle of Waterloo, and is remembered for having been a psychological weapon against Napoleon; Wellington received the news of the French attack at Charleroi while he was at the ball, and calmly proceeded with his dinner. Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, met someone in her youth who had been present at the Waterloo Ball, and was still telling the story in the 1970s.
The 'Waterloo' Duchess brought the Gordon estates into the Richmond family, and eventually the re-creation of the Gordon dukedom, bestowed on her grandson. The Duke died in Canada of an agonising disease.' He was infected by hydrophobia by a rabid fox, and the only way in which he could secure medical attention (not that that could have saved him) was to sail up the St Lawrence. The sight of that vast expanse of water brought on successive violent fits, yet he fought his impulses and made the journey which must have been a slow thumbscrew of pain to him. Eventually, he could take it no longer. He begged to be rowed to dry land, then ran full pelt as far from water as possible. He died in a forest bam.
The 5th Duke, his son, had a distinguished political career, was a cabinet minister, and was tipped as Prime Minister after Wellington. He was, yet again, much liked, frank and open, and adored by his tenantry, but Greville left us a picture of political blundering which is far from flattering. Greville allows that he was a very good debater, good-humoured, a "good fellow" and an excellent friend, and readily admits that his colleagues held him in high regard, but adds that in his view he was "utterly incapable". He goes on: "He has, in fact, that weight which a man can derive from being positive, obstinate, pertinacious, and busy, but his understanding lies in a nutshell, and his information in a pin's head." In one of the most consummate portraits of character, at which Greville is so singularly adept, he brings to life this amiable man in a few telling but impolite words: "He happens to have his wits, such as they are, about him ... is prejudiced, narrow-minded, illiterate, and ignorant, good-looking, good-humoured, unaffected, tedious, prolix, unassuming, and a Duke."132
The 6th Duke (1818-1903) was a personal favourite with Queen Victoria, who created him Duke of Gordon in 1876 (only one other fresh dukedom has been created since that date, the dukedom of Fife). This means that the present holder of the title has more dukedoms than any of his colleagues in that dignity. He is a duke four times over, being Duke of Lennox, Duke of Gordon, and Duke of Aubigny as well as Duke of Richmond. Another distinction is the number of Knights of the Garter there have been in the family; out of only nine Dukes, the first seven were invested K.G.
The present Duke of Richmond, born in 1904, might with justice be called 'the reluctant Duke'. He was not meant to inherit the titles, being the third son of the 8th Duke, but his eldest brother died in infancy, and the second brother, who was destined to be the heir, was killed in Russia in 1919. So Frederick Gordon-Lennox found himself prospective landlord of 280,000 acres, when in truth he would have been perfectly happy as a garage mechanic.
Both he and his brother were fascinated by machines. It was the age when both the motor-car and the aeroplane were young and dangerous. Their grandfather, the old 7th Duke, was very disapproving and thought them little short of revolutionary to show interest in such unsuitable subjects. But "Freddie", on coming down from Oxford, worked in a car factory, on the shop floor, as plain "Mr Settrington". "It was the happiest time of my life," he says.
"Freddie March" was famous in the early thirties as a racing-car driver. Probably no one person did more to foster British amateur car-racing than he, who converted a wartime airfield at Goodwood into the only permanent racing-track in England. It was "permanent" until 1966, when the risks to spectators as speeds became greater forced him to abandon it.
The Duke was one of the first landed aristocrats to foresee the necessity of adapting to a more restricted life-style. The familiar story of successive death duties changed the prospects of Goodwood over a few years, with the 7th Duke dying in 1928, and the 8th Duke soon after in 1935. Gordon Castle in Scotland was sold, with thousands of acres, another Scottish estate of 45,000 acres in Banffshire was sold to the Crown in 1937; pictures, rare books, went under the hammer. All that was left was the estate at Goodwood, and even that had to be compressed after the war, when the Duke had to face the ultimate decision how to carry on living at Goodwood in changed circumstances. In common with his reforming ancestors, he solved the problem in a characteristically social-minded way. (He says, incidentally, that the social conscience of the Richmonds lay in abeyance for 100 years, and that he was brought up strictly to think of "us and them".)
The Duke established various industries at Goodwood, to bring income to the estate and employment to tenants. A thriving wood turnery, making anything from chair legs upwards, was started with one circular saw. Private companies were formed, of which Goodwood Estates Ltd is the chief, to run the industries, the racecourse, and the house. The Duke and his son, Lord March, are now both tenants of this company, in which neither has a major shareholding. One
whole wing of Goodwood, containing thirty bedrooms, was converted into five well-appointed flats, and let to workers and staff at peppercorn rents; some other rooms were made into a working-man's club. The Duke established a private pension scheme for all tenants at his own expense.
In 1950 "Glorious Goodwood", which Greville thought combined everything that was enjoyable in life, was opened to the public (it had been open once a week since 1912). In 1958 the Duke moved out of Goodwood House to a small cottage on the estate, with six rooms, where he now lives with his wife and a staff of two old-age pensioners. His son, Lord March, lives in one wing of Goodwood House, and runs the family businesses, which continue to grow and diversify. It is a long journey from the coal tax, which gave the first Duke and his descendants an income from every ton of coal exported from the Tyne. This was sold to the government in 1800 for £728,333, and was finally abolished in 1831. There are, however, the Goodwood races (horses, not cars) which have been among the most celebrated since 1802. Goodwood has one of the only two privately owned racecourses in the country, the other being Ascot, which belongs to the Queen.
The Duke of Richmond has managed, in a quiet and unheralded way, to straddle the chasm between the aristocratic life to which he was born and the society of middle-class and working-class people with whom he has spent much of his life. He has worked in a factory, and has run a car business in London. In this he is not alone in the twentieth century, but he has been more successful, because it is in his blood. He does not see the difficulty, nor the incongruity, of entertaining the Queen and Prince Philip at Goodwood, and personally waiting upon one's charwoman when she is ill. His grandfather would have shuddered, and there are other ducal incumbents now who would shudder still. Richmond is an unpretentious man, of easy manners, amiable, charming, good company, with a sense of humour sometimes at his own expense, and helpful. Hervey's remark on the 2nd Duke, his ancestor, could be applied with equal felicity to him. He has inherited not only four dukedoms, but something more precious - the genes of a family of decent and benevolent people.
The Duke's mother, Dowager Duchess of Richmond, died in 1971, aged ninety-nine years and six months, probably another record. In 1928 the Duke married Miss Elizabeth Hudson, a vicar's daughter from Wendover, a choice which met with blank incomprehension from his grandfather, who suspected they would have to live 'over the shop'. While they live in Game's Seat, the small cottage with a big view, their son and heir, Lord March, lives at Goodwood, where he has been more energetic than anyone else in his efforts to show the public what would be the effects of currently proposed legislation on beautiful country houses, and to convince them that he and other landowners are there not because it is nice to live in a grand house while other people live in slums, but because he feels he is a guardian of part of the country's heritage. Duty, not choice, impels him to protect Goodwood, in the knowledge that if he doesn't, nobody else will.
references
1. John Evelyn, Diary, 4th February 1685.
2. ibid, August 1649.
3. Elizabeth D'Oyley, James Duke of Monmouth, p. 10; Lord
George Scott, Lucy Walter, Wife or Mistress, pp. 27, 74.
4. D.N.B.
5. D'Oyley, 27.
6. D.N.B.
7. Complete Peerage.
8. Hartmann, Charles II and Madame, p. 73.
9. D'Oyley, 33.
10. D'Oyley, 266; Arthur Bryant, King Charles II, pp. 161, 283,
301-
11. Scott, 105—1.1; Baronne D'Aulnoy, Memoirs of the Court of
England in 1675, p. 379; Lord Mersey, A Picture of Life 1872-1940, p.236.
12. Complete Peerage, I, App. E, p. 478.
13. D'Oyley, 316.
14. D'Oyley, 316-21, and Verney MSS.
15. Reresby, Memoirs (1735), p. 10.
16. Paul Bloomfield, Uncommon People, passim.
17. Pepys Diary, ed. Wheatley, Vol. II, p. 69.
18. Pepys, II, 239.
19. Arthur Bryant, Charles II, pp. 146-152.
20. D.N.B.
21. D.N.B.
22. Pepys, VII, 50.
23. Coxe MSS, quoted in Complete Peerage.
24. Pepys, VII, 59.
25. Complete Peerage
26. Evelyn, 1st March 1671.
27. H. Montgomery Hyde, History of Pornography, p. 76.
28. Complete Peerage, III, 284 (c).
29. Howell's State Trials (1816), Vol. XIV, pp. 1327 et seq.
30. Jeanine Delpech, Duchess of Portsmouth, p. 194. 3.1. Notes and Queries, 6th Series, Vol. VIII, p. 176
32. Evelyn, ed. Bray (1850), II, 135.
33. H. Noel Williams, Rival Sultanas, p. 169.
34. ibid., 173.
35. ibid., 174.Delpech, 89.
36. ibid., 88, H. Forneron, Louise de Kerouaille, pp. 115-17.
37. Granger's History (1779), Vol. Ill, p. 211.
38. Peter Cunningham, The Story of Nell Gwynn, pp. 121, 202.
39. ibid., 152.
40. ibid., 135.
41. ibid., 206.
42. Genealogical Magazine, January 1901.
43. Macky, Characters, (1704), p. 50.
44. Evelyn, 9th October 1671.
45. Osmund Airy, Charles II.
46. Forneron, 1118; Williams, 166.
47. Donald Adamson and Peter Beauclerk Dewar, The House of
Nell Gwynn, p. 6.
48. D.N.B.
49. Evelyn, 1 oth September 1675.
50. Delpech, 71-2.
51. Forneron, 277.
52. ibid., 280.
53. Williams, 148; Delpech, 175; D.N.B.
54. Delpech, 137.
55. Evelyn, II,,195, 199.
56. Delpech, 160; Collins Peerage, I, 206.
57. Hist. MSS. Comm., Frankland-Russell-Astley MSS, p. 58.
58. Mary Gladstone, Diaries and Letters, 21st September 1865.
59. Complete Peerage.
60. Walpole, XX, 137-8.
61. Roger Mortimer, The Jockey Club, p. 24.
62. W. M. Thackeray, The Four Georges, p. 85.
63. T. Raikes, Journal.
64. The Life of William Wilberforce, p. 303, quoted in Complete
Peerage.
65. Old and New London, IV, 286; Journal of Elizabeth Lady
Holland, II, 281; Burke, Romantic Records of the Aristocracy, II, 42; Wraxall, Posthumous Memoirs, II, 175.
66. Old and New London, IV, 334.
67. ibid., IV, 54.
68. Greville I, 298; V. 202.
69. Lord Ernest Hamilton, Forty Years On, p. 130.
70. Daily Telegraph, 5th October 1973.
71. Chips Channon, Diaries, ed. Robert Rhodes James, p. 428.
72. Frances, Countess of Warwick, Afterthoughts, p. 49.
73. Daily Express, 2oth October 1971.
74. Complete Peerage.
75. Waldegrave, Memoirs, p. 114.
76. Walpole, XXI, 78-9.
77. Correspondence between Frances, Countess of Hertford and
the Countess of Pomfret (1805), Vol. II, pp. 98-101.
78. Walpole, XVIII, 273.
79. ibid., XVII, 174.
80. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Works (1822), Vol. I, p. 252.
81. The Orrery Papers, ed. Countess of Cork and Orrery (1903),
Vol. II, p. 294.
82. Chatsworth Collections, 228.9 (23rd November 1736).
83. ibid., 228.2 (18th September 1735).
84. ibid., 228.14.
85. Walpole, XVIII, 255.
86. Massey, History of England, I, 189.
87. The Spectator, 12th November 1898.
88. Letters of Junius (1797), Vol. I, pp. 77-9.
89. Wraxall, Historical Memoirs, p. 273.
90. Town and Country (1769), Vol. I, p. 114.
91. Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George III, Vol. IV, p. 47.
92. Public Record Office, DPP 1,95/4, 95/5.
93. Complete Peerage.
94. Walpole, XXI, 172.
96. ibid., 54.
97. Sir Percy Croft, The Abbey of Kilkhampton, quoted in Com
plete Peerage.
98. Lady Harriet Cavendish, Letters, p. 36.
99. Adamson and Dewar, op. cit., pp. 97-9.
100. The Times, 8th August 1837.
101. Old and New London, IV, 280.
102. Mrs Barron-Wilson, Memoirs of Miss Mellon (1886), Vol. II,
p. 171.
103. Creevey Papers, II, 120.
104. Creevy, Life and Times, p. 266.
105. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, Vol. Ill, p. 203.
106. Lockhart, Life of Sir Walter Scott, Vol. VIII, p. 116.
107. Adamson and Dewar, op. cit., p. 135.
108. Lady Holland to Her Son, p. 65. 11 o. ibid., p. 71.
in. Barron-Wilson, op. cit., p. 175.
112. Old and New London, V, 398.
113. Lady Holland to Her Son, 11b.
hi4.. Adamson and Dewar, op. cit., 144.
115. Barron-Wilson, op. cit., 184.
116. Creevey Papers, 11,217.
117. The Times, 8th August 1837.
118. Old and New London, IV, 281.
119. Adamson and Dewar, op.cit., 189.
120. ibid., .190.
121. Hervey, Memoirs, 1,252.
122. Walpole, XVII, 184.
123. Lord Hervey and His Friends, p. 100.
124. Earl of March, A Duke and His Friends (1911); Lord
Hervey and His Friends, p. 137.
125. Walpole, George III, I, 20; Wraxall, Hist. Mem., 371.
126. Hist. MSS. Comm., Abergavenny MSS, p. 31.
127. Correspondence of Charles James Fox, Vol. I, p. 455.
128. Alison Olson, The Radical Duke.
129. Walpole, XXIX, 54.
130. Private Letters of Sir Robert Peel, p. 34.
131. Mrs Trench, Remains, p. 406.
Greville, I, 284; II, 399.j.
3 The Maverick
Duke of Bedford
John Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford, known to family and friends as Ian, is undoubtedly the maverick among dukes of the realm. Without apology and with entire success, he has exploited his title for the sake of his home, and has been seen to do so with unabashed relish. Bedford is now a world-famous showman who enjoys the kind of popularity usually accorded only to film stars. He has, indeed, appeared in several films, made countless television appearances, and pays his dues to Equity, the actors' union. Visitors to Woburn Abbey, his magnificent seat in Bedfordshire (pronounced "Wooburn", by the way), would receive the Duke's autograph whether they asked for it or not, and often were allowed, not to say encouraged, to shake the ducal hand. Such relentless exhibitionism has made Bedford the best known of the dukes, allowed him to live comfortably at Woburn, and rescued him from the parallel scourges of a cold manner and an obsessive shyness which are characteristic of his family.
The Dukes Page 17