The Dukes

by Brian Masters

  Harriette Wilson is not always reliable. She is generally valued for the vividness of her dialogue, not the veracity of her portraits. She is, however, corroborated by another, independent source. In 1816, when the Duke was twenty-five (some four or five years after his liaison with Harriette), he paid his respects to a sixteen-year-old heiress, Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, with a view to assessing her possibilities as his duchess. What he thought of her we do not know, but the young girl confided to her diary exactly what she thought of him. He was "not ill-looking, very amiable, of the highest rank and immense fortune, in short he was an unexceptionable parti. I met him frequently in Bruton Street, and always thought him dull. He did not propose to me but his grandfather Mr Ogilvy [that same rough Scots tutor who married the 1st Duchess of Leinster] did to my guardians. Mrs Taylor [her aunt and guardian] said she had no objection to him but she thought it a mercenary marriage on his part and said I was too young to marry for a year. My mother tormented me extremely [this was her other guardian]. She said she could not object to one so unobjectionable, but she balanced against his rank and merits so many defects, stinginess, love of Ireland, etc., that had I liked the Duke I should have been puzzled."20 Nothing came of the encounter. The Duke married a daughter of the Earl of Harrington two years later, and Frances Anne became the celebrated coal-owning Marchioness of Londonderry.

  The 4th Duke of Leinster (1819-1887) had the unhappy experi­ence of living at a time when the ideas promulgated by his reforming ancestors took root in Ireland and incited the long bloody struggle to evict the English influence altogether. Protests were loud against the absentee landlord who charged extortionate rents for very little, and spent all the proceeds on amusing himself in London. The Duke of Leinster could not be counted among such people. He lived all his life among his tenants, and did all he could to improve their welfare and meet their demands. He even offered to sell them their land under the terms of Lord Ashbourne's Act, which provided for the advance by the Land Commission of the full purchase money to a tenant who agreed with his landlord to buy his holding, but the offer was rejected.* The FitzGeralds showed the Irish how to stand up for themselves, and the Irish stood up against the FitzGeralds. In revolution there is no room for demanding fair play.

  *The Land Purchase Act of 1885

  Leinster did not bother with politics. He wrote the history of his family, Earls of Kildare, an indispensable reference book, and had a happy marriage with one of the ubiquitous Leveson-Gowers, a daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. She died only a few months after him in 1887, when the title passed to his son, father of the 6th and 7th Dukes.

  The 5th Duke of Leinster (1851-1893), who died of typhoid fever, also eschewed politics, leading a simple life with simple habits. The glamour of his existence derived from his wife Hermione, a daughter of the Earl of Faversham and, according to the Duke of Portland, one of the great beauties of the late Victorian era. Lady Londonderry has written of her "renowned beauty" and "strikingly brilliant com­plexion",21 while a more recent author refers to her as "the beautiful tubercular Hermione".22 She died in the south of France, where she had repaired for her health.

  These two deaths mark the virtual end of the long and illustrious history of a remarkable family. After seven centuries of influence and distinction, the Geraldines of Kildare enter upon a sad decline with the coming of the twentieth century. The 5th Duke and Hermione had three sons, the eldest of whom naturally succeeded as 6th Duke. It is upon the youngest boy, however, that we must concetrate our attention.

  Lord Edward FitzGerald, born in 1892, was only eighteen months old when his father died, thus depriving him of a restraining influence which might have made all the difference to events. With the law of primo geniture effectively releasing him from any of the restrictions which accompany the responsibilities of a head of family, Lord Edward threw himself into a carefree and joyful youth. He was handsome, adventurous, and a lord; life was going to be fun. In 1913 he married, at Wandsworth Registry Office, an actress on the musical comedy stage, May Etheridge, one of the singers and dancers who are nowadays known under the generic name of "Gaiety Girls" (although they did not all perform at the Gaiety Theatre). It was one of the alliances between aristocracy and stage which was a part of life in Edwardian London. In 1914 their only son was born, and by the following year the marriage was at an end; they did not divorce until seventeen years later, but they had ceased to live together in 1915. He claimed later that he had never been in love with May Etheridge.

  Lord Edward served with distinction in the Great War, as captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and was wounded. The war produced two events which were to shape his future. First, his next older brother, Lord Desmond, was killed in action in France in 1916, which placed Edward next in line for the dukedom. (Desmond died a hero's death. He threw himself on a bomb to save the lives of his colleagues.) Secondly, his eldest brother, the Duke, was afflicted with a tumour on the brain which rendered him a useless invalid, incapable of managing family affairs. The Leinster fortune was in the hands of trustees who, observing Lord Edward's style of living, did not wish to make him a handsome regular allowance which he would immediately waste. He, on the other hand, seeing that he would almost certainly come into the dukedom one day, as his brother would not marry and have children, saw no reason to cease enjoying life in his fashion. The result was, he ran up enormous debts.

  In 1919 a receiving order was made against him as a bankrupt. It was then that he made the fateful decision to gamble away his inheritance.

  A wealthy business man called Sir Harry Mallaby-Deeley proposed to advance Lord Edward £60,000 immediately, which would cancel his debts, in return for the sale of his reversionary life interest in the Leinster estates. In other words, for as long as he lived, any income due to him from the estate would go instead to Mallaby-Deeley and his heirs. To FitzGerald it seemed a reasonable chance to take. His brother was still a young man, and as long as he was alive, his own income from the estate was negligible or nil. The loan would get him out of a scrape now; he could deal with the future when it happened.

  Unfortunately for Edward FitzGerald, his invalid brother died in 1922, and he became 7th Duke of Leinster, entitled to an income from the settled estates of £80,000 a year, but destined never to get a penny. The contract he had signed with Mallaby-Deeley was legal and binding. None of the family property would belong to him as long as he lived. There was even a clause in the contract which gave Mallaby-Deeley the right to prevent the Duke from doing anything which might shorten his life and so reduce the period for which he would legally own the Duke's estate. He insured the Duke's life for £300,000. The trustees offered to buy back the inheritance for £250,000, but Mallaby-Deeley would have none of it. He asked £400,000. The most he would grant was a purely voluntary gift of £1000 a year to the Duke. The Duke of Leinster had ruined himself, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it.

  He showed little sign of being chastened. Another receiving order was made against him in 1923, but still he lived as if he were a rich man. It was not entirely his fault that he was trapped in a vortex of publicity which laid bare his every indiscretion. Deprived of his own money, he tried other ways of getting it. In July 1922 he laid a bet for £3000 that he could drive from London to Aberdeen in fifteen hours. He made the journey in fourteen and a half hours, covering 557 miles, no small feat in 1922. Unfortunately, he was summonsed for failing to produce a driving licence. On 15th July he was fined £2 for speeding (at thirty-eight and a half miles per hour!) and four days later he paid £5 for speeding on Constitution Hill (at thirty-three miles per hour). It transpired that he had previous convictions dating back to 1914.

  The 1923 bankruptcy hearing showed a total debt of £25,300 listed by creditors. The income from the Leinster estates was protected from the claims of creditors and left absolutely in the discretion of the trustees, who would not release it. For the Duke, therefore, it was a personal debt; he had no remunerative occupa
tion and no capital, his only source still being £20 a week.

  There was some furniture left to him by the terms of his father's will (the 5th Duke). He thought he would sell this. Said the Official Receiver, "Are any steps being taken to release the furniture in Ireland?" to which Mr Salaman, the Duke's harassed solicitor, had to reply, "I am told that if anyone from England attempts to release it they will be shot."

  A few months later the Duke was found guilty of obtaining credit on false pretences, and had to suffer the humiliation of a stern rebuke from the judge, who told him, "We treat everyone alike in these courts."23 He fled for a while to America. (Mallaby-Deeley later relented, and sold some of the Leinster property to pay off the creditors.)

  The Duke retired to a life of comparative obscurity after these inauspicious beginnings, emerging to serve in World War II, and to marry three more times. May Etheridge died of an overdose of sleeping draught in 1935. He married, secondly, Raffaelle Kennedy. His third wife was also a musical comedy star, Denise Orme (real name Jessie Smithers), who had previously been twice married. The six children of her first marriage included the Duchess of Bedford (Lydia, the present Duke's second wife), Lady Cadogan, and Joan Aly Khan. The Duke of Bedford described her as "one of the most enchanting and fascinating characters I have ever met".

  She could be as abrupt as anyone born to the style. If she found a bore amongst her guests, she would go to the chair in which he was comfortably installed, shake him by the hand, and say, "I'm sorry you're going. Do come again," pull him out of the chair and propel him backwards out of the door.24 She died in 1960.

  The Duke's last wife was Mrs Conner (nee Felton), whom he married in 1965. She used to be the housekeeper at the block of service flatlets where the Duke lived, and she hailed from Streatham. The Duke lived in a succession of council flats or bedsitting-rooms all his life. For forty-five years he was an undischarged bankrupt, thereby forfeiting his right to sit in the House of Lords or to participate in the coronation ceremonies of 1937 and 1953. He was finally dis­charged from bankruptcies in 1964. For a while, he and his duchess ran a tea-shop in Rye. Leinster eventually took his seat in the Lords for the first time on 15 July 1975: he had been Duke for more than half a century.

  Meanwhile, the Mallaby-Deeleys flourished, and the Leinster estate dribbled away. They sold Carton, the principal family seat in County Kildare, in 1951; the purchaser was Lord Brocket, the brewer. The heir, Lord Kildare (May Etheridge's son), had to give his permission for the sale, which he did in exchange for being allowed to live at another family property, Kilkea Castle, with enough cash to renovate it. He lived there from 1949 to 1960, and his children were born there. It then became an American hotel, specialising in "group tours", and is now a health farm. With the proceeds from the sale, Lord Kildare bought a comfortable house in Oxfordshire, which was not his to sell, but which he occupied by virtue of a smaller conditional settlement of the Leinster Trust. (It is furnished entirely with the con­tents of Carton, and hung with family pictures, which belonged, of course, like everything else, to the Mallaby-Deeleys.)

  The 7th Duke of Leinster died in London in March. 1976, at the age of eighty-three. Even in death he was pursued by insatiable publicity.

  Before he could be left in peace, and the errors of his life forgotten, his very title was challenged by a claimant living near San Francisco, California, whose name was Leonard Fitzgerald. (Murmurs had been heard from him earlier than this, but they now reached a crescendo.) Mr Fitzgerald's claim to be the rightful Duke was based upon an assertion that he was the son of the 6th Duke who was supposed to have died an invalid in Edinburgh in 1922, but who in fact emigrated and lived until 1967. According to this version of events, the 1922 death certificate referred to another brother, Frederick, whose existence had been kept quiet, and whose name was changed to 'Maurice' on the certificate, while the real Maurice had run away on a cattle boat to the New World. (Why this should happen, no one has seen fit to explain, and fanciful stories that the man in Edinburgh was an hermaphrodite do nothing to render it more plausible.) Were this true, then the genuine Duke of Leinster had been living in Wyoming, leaving the title and family problems of his younger brother. Throughout 1976, newspapers picked at the story repeatedly, while the new Duke kept silent, protecting his family as best he could from ill-informed gossip.

  The final word was given in September 1976 when the Lord Chan­cellor instructed that a writ of summons to attend the House of Lords be issued to the 8th Duke of Leinster. The Duke took his seat on 21st October 1976. The Lord Chancellor is not known to behave frivolously in such matters, and one may well conclude that the San Francisco claimant will be lost in historical perspective.

  During his father's lifetime, the 8th Duke was unable to settle part of the estate on other members of the family, but was obliged to watch it diminish to vanishing point, powerless to intervene. Now that he has inherited, the entire family estate has reverted to him, or what is left of it, and the Mallaby-Deeleys have no further interest. He has worked all his life, knowing that he was not entitled to a penny from the estate, and he continues to work now. He is Chairman of C.S.E. Aviation, at Oxford, the largest air training school in Europe. He has never borne resentment against the Mallaby-Deeley family. He recognised that his father made a bad deal, and Sir Harry a good one, and has never thought it a productive exercise to chastise anyone for a gamble which cost him the greater part of his inheritance.

  references

  1. Complete Peerage.

  2. Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, p. 42.

  3. D.N.B.

  4. Complete Peerage.

  5. Duke of Leinster, The Earl of Kildare, p. 307.

  6. ibid., 309.

  7. D.N.B.

  8. Brian Fitzgerald, Emily Duchess of Leinster, p. 141.

  9. Walpole, XIX, 241-2.

  10. 13 February, 1747. British Museum Additional MSS, 32710,

  F. 201.

  11. Fitzgerald, op. cit., p. 204.

  12. D.N.B.

  13. Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland, Vol. I, p. 187; D.N.B.

  14. ibid., p. 188.

  15. Barrington's Historic Memoirs, quoted in Fitzgerald, op. cit.,

  p. 274.

  16. Complete Peerage.

  17. Town and Country, Vol. VIII, p. 569.

  18. Creevey Papers, Vol. II, p. 191.

  19. Harriette Wilson, Memoirs, Vol. I, pp. 211, 253, 282.

  20. Edith Marchioness of Londonderry, Frances Anne, p. 24.

  21. Edith Marchioness of Londonderry, Retrospect, p. 16.

  22. Anita Leslie, Edwardians in Love, p. 263.

  23. The Times, 23rd December 1922; 9th January, 23rd January,

  16th March, 26th April, 9th, 15th, 16th and 29th May 1923.

  Duke of Bedford, A Silver-plated Spoon, pp. 172-3.g.

  9 Clash of the Clans

  Duke of Argyll; Duke of Atholl; Duke of Roxburghe

  Scottish dukes for the most part regard themselves as chieftains first, and as dukes only second. The flattery of a title cannot bend a man's vanity if he already carries an eminence among his own people far above that which could be bestowed by any monarch. Ian Campbell, for example (born 1937), though Duke of Argyll twice and a host of other dignities besides, is above all Mac Cailein Mhor ("Son of the great Colin"), a Celtic honour which his family has held since 1280, and by virtue of which he is chief of Clan Campbell.

  The clans have a bloody history. That they have survived the slaughter at all is due to the fact that illegitimacy was no bar to membership; there were always more "Campbells" to take over. Added to which if a man lived on Campbell land he was obliged to become one of the family and adopt the Campbell name. ("Campbell" originally meant "the man with the crooked mouth".)

  Clan Campbell gained ascendancy over the others by brute tenacity in the first place, reinforced by shrewd political cunning. The Campbells had quick brains, could turn every circumstance to their own advantage, probe every situation, and not hesit
ate at all to change skins, chameleon-like, when it suited them. By the fifteenth century they had immense authority in Scotland, and in the sixteenth were closely involved with Mary Queen of Scots. It was the time of their deepest ruthlessness. "The Scottish nobles from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century were probably the most turbulent, rapacious and ignorant in Europe . . . resolute champions of indefensible privileges."1