But for the moment we are in 1785, when Leveson-Gower married the Countess. As dowry, she brought her husband 1735 square miles of land, or two-thirds of the county of Sutherland. The following year, his father was created Marquess of Stafford, and he himself inherited that title in 1803, together with the Shropshire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire estates. In the same year, his uncle the bachelor Duke of Bridgwater died, leaving him the finest private art collection in the country at that time, and a still greater fortune. Leveson- Gower had risen from comparative obscurity to an unassailable position, with tens of thousands of tenants and a colossal income of £300,000 a year; his nearest rivals, like the dukes of Devonshire and Bedford, were considered extremely rich with £50,000 a year. Greville rightly called him "a leviathan of wealth".4 The pity was that neither he nor the Countess possessed the intelligence to know how best to use all this money. Neither subtlety nor sensitivity had been passed down by the Gowers. From 1803 to 1833, this couple were known as Marquess and Marchioness of Stafford, names which during that period were loathed in the shire of Sutherland, because the Marquess and his wife had decided in their wisdom to "improve" the land.
There can be no dispute that Sutherland needed improving. In 1812 there was not a single road in the whole county, and only one bridge. It was wild isolated country, rugged and barren, almost like a lunar landscape. Hardly anyone ventured into the interior, and those who did emerged weather-beaten and hungry, swearing never to go back. The Marquess of Stafford was not one of them. For twenty years he saw nothing of Sutherland save what was visible from Dunrobin Castle, and showed no inclination to explore.5 But in 1811 Parliament offered to pay half the expense of building roads in Scotland, if landowners would bear the other half. First, Stafford bought off the Reay estate for £300,000 (only one year's income to him), so that he was master of almost the entire county, and then he set to work. By the time he had finished, twenty years later, he had built 450 miles of excellent roads, among the best in Great Britain, 134 bridges, and an iron bridge with a span of 1150 feet, uniting Sutherland and Ross-shire at Bonar. He had opened up the county to the mail service, which now went as far as Thurso, and previously did not penetrate Sutherland at all. Improvements there had been, and great was the achievement. But in the process the lives of the people had been made a misery.
The trouble was, the Staffords had no imagination. They were not the kind of people to see that what they were doing could cause distress, because they could see no further than their noses and their inhuman statistics. Even his own grandson, the Victorian aesthete Lord Ronald Gower, had to admit that Stafford was a bottomlessly dull man. He never did or said anything that was worth remembering, said Gower, and what he wrote was boring beyond comprehension. He suffered from gout and myopia, and was conspicuous only by virtue of his huge hawk-like nose, bigger even than Wellington's, a nose, incidentally, that was bequeathed by his family to the Beauforts, and is still proudly worn by the present Duke of Beaufort (Stafford's sister married a Duke of Beaufort). He had only one ambition, to be a duke, and it drove him desperate;6 it was the only rank he could be awarded, having inherited the others already. "He might have slipped into his grave and the Dictionary of National Biography without being remembered for anything more spectacular than his wealth and his art collection had it not been for his marriage and its consequences."7
As for his wife, she had been pretty as a young girl, and excited the admiration of Lady Bessborough, who thought her the most enviable person she knew, "with great cleverness, beauty, talents, and a thousand amiable qualities ... a propriety of manner and conduct".8 Her tenants saw another person. Though she was the Great Lady of Sutherland, she spoke no Gaelic (the only language of her people), and according to one writer actually despised the customs and manners of the Highland people whose chief she was. "She was asEnglish in mood and taste as the furniture of a London drawing- room."9
The folk over whom this cushioned couple ruled, and about whom they knew nothing, were a tough race of mountain-dwellers, completely insular (owing to the absence of roads) and fiercely independent. They lived in crude hovels scattered over the Highlands, grew potatoes, raised a few goats and cattle, and brewed raw whisky. Their standards were never far above famine level, and they lived in "conditions of penury and squalor that can only fairly be compared with those of a famine area in contemporary India, and were tolerable only because they were familiar and traditional".10 There were about 25,000 of them, and they were as much a race of foreigners to the English (which includes the Marquess of Stafford) as the Red Indians of America or the Aborigines of Australia. They were said to be lamentably indolent, and only their bravery in war was acknowledged. The Countess thought of them as a burden, the Marquess didn't think of them at all.
So, when the government offered to share the cost of "improving" the land, it never entered Lord Stafford's head that the inhabitants might object to being forcibly moved from their homes, like a bothersome ant-hill. They were ignorant, illiterate, slothful. It was not their business to object. The Marquess's agents presented themselves at thousands of huts, with orders for the tenants to move to the coast. Not only were they to be evicted, but they were expected to pay four shillings each towards the cost of the road-building, which the Marquess would otherwise have to bear out of his own pocket. Those who went struggled to earn a new living on a notoriously inhospitable coast, rugged and stormy and rocky, perched precariously like leaves in autumn. They had spent their lives rearing goats and growing crops; now they were to fish - there was nothing else for them to do. The huts they left behind, where they had lived for generations, were burned to the ground before they had time to get over the horizon. Those who refused to leave saw their houses burned before their eyes, sometimes with their few belongings still inside. Others emigrated to Northern America. One way or another, the land was swept clear of people, to make way for roads, and to prepare the land for southern sheep-farmers, who were even then being invited to establish themselves in Sutherland. The county was divided into lots, and advertised in the south.The Marquess and the Countess saw none of the evictions: they were not aware of any suffering, and if they were they would not have spared more than a moment's reflection; for these Highlanders were not real people; they were natives, and they were uneconomic. Lord Stafford was "seized as much as I am with the rage of improvements", wrote the Countess of Sutherland. "It was as if the whole population of Sutherland was being shaken in a great cup, thrown out, and allowed to fall where it would on the coast or blow away to the other side of the world", wrote the historian of the Great Improvement. There is no record of how many people were summarily removed in this way, but it was somewhere between 5000 and 15,000. The criminal insensitivity of Lord and Lady Stafford has not been forgotten in Sutherland. One of them, a stonemason, immortalised his people's plight in later years: "The country was darkened by the smoke of burnings", he wrote, "and the descendants were ruined, trampled upon, dispersed, and compelled to seek asylum across the sea". This man, Donald Macleod, was hounded by Stafford's men, and driven eventually into exile; his wife was driven into madness by the persecution she suffered.11
As the cruelty of the Sutherland evictions became known, fierce arguments raged as to whose fault it was, and inevitably some misconceptions have taken root in time. The most notorious sheep-farmer was Patrick Sellar, a sadist whose worst excesses have entered legend. When the Countess and her husband heard what had been going on in their names they were appalled.12 Nor can their chief agent, the architect of the improvements, be entirely blamed. He was James Loch, a self-made man, enlightened and intelligent. He allowed his vision of a bright future for the county to overwhelm his humanity, perhaps, but only the best motives can be laid at his door.
The clearance policy did enormous good in the long run. It opened up the country, provided employment and mobility, spread educational standards, and conquered once and for all the threat of famine. The Staffords personally gained nothing from it. T
heir investment never made a return. The clearances took place between 1806 and 1820, and were meant to make way for southern sheep-farmers who would bring prosperity to the county. In fact, sheep-farming was a failure, and after 1820 the price of wool fell drastically. Local inhabitants were, in the end, triumphant.Whatever the economic wisdom of the scheme, history has convicted the Staffords of criminal responsibility. It was "an economic policy that entailed the instant transformation of an ancient way of life . . . part of the internal colonisation of Britain".13 A local man pointed out, "It is one thing thing to build a village, to which people may resort if they choose it, and another to drive them from the country into villages where they must starve, unless they change at once their manners, their habits, and their occupations."14 Lord Stafford could not possibly have understood this, and must stand condemned for a decision of principle which was his - that for the sake of progress it was worth destroying the happiness of thousands of people.
Professor Checkland has called the clearances "one of the most tragic and emotive incidents in the long death of traditional peasant society in Britain",16 and F. F. Darling went as far as to say they were "of the order of brutality expected of a Norse raid a thousand years earlier".18 No wonder Karl Marx, with his curious blend of intellectual precision in the service of distorted dogma, should have written an entire article on Sutherland in the People's Paper."
In 1833 Stafford achieved his ultimate aim of becoming a duke, and, though an Englishman, the title he was given was Duke of Sutherland. He lived to enjoy his new rank only six months. "I believe he is the richest individual who ever died", wrote Greville.18 He had been Ambassador in France during the French Revolution, he had opened the Bridgwater Collection at Stafford House in London to the public, but nothing could brighten his memory. He has come to posterity as the dullard who threw out his wife's hereditary tenants.
The Duke's widow lived for another six years, during which time she was known to the world by a unique and curious title - the "Duchess-Countess". She lost her prettiness, and grew rather plump, which enabled Creevey to make one of his pitilessly precise observations. "It was as good as a play", he wrote, "to see old Sutherland moving her huge derriere by slow and dignified degrees about in her chair, so as to come into action if necessary."19
The Duchess-Countess died in 1839, and her two sons began the two separate lines of descent which bring us to 1963. From the first son were descended the next four dukes of Sutherland, and from the second son (see page 340) are descended the Earls of Ellesmere, the last of whom succeeded as 6th and present Duke of Sutherland in 1963. The 2nd Duke of Sutherland (1786-1861) does not appear to have been very distinguished. Like his father, he said and did nothing which has been remembered. We do, however, know that he was bookish. He was an original member of the Roxburghe Club, a Trustee of the British Museum, and a Commissioner for the Fine Arts. It is also certain that he took a far greater interest in his tenants than his parents had done. The potato famine of 1846-8 caused him acute anxiety and real emotional stress, as he tried personally to deal with the hardships his people suffered. Apart from that, all that has come down to us is that he was stone-deaf, conceived a hopeless passion for the Queen of Prussia, so strong that he fell dangerously ill on hearing of her death, and that he married Harriet, a grand-daughter of Georgiana and the 5th Duke of Devonshire.
As so often happens, it was the Duchess who made more of a mark than the Duke. It was she who bestirred him to build Cliveden, the handsome country house in Buckinghamshire, which earned notice in World War II as the home of the Astors. Her friendship with Queen Victoria has made her name more than a footnote to history, surviving even the embarrassment of fainting away during dinner at the Palace.20 She was the Queen's favourite Mistress of the Robes, and one of her closest friends. The only instance of discord between the two women occurred when the Duchess failed to persuade the Queen to give the Garter to the Duke of Sutherland. Victoria thought, justifiably, that he had quite enough already.21 At all other times their intimacy was unassailable. On a visit to Stafford House, the Queen was wont to say, "I have come from my house to your palace." She was the Queen's only companion in the first years of the Queen's widowhood. Both women were widowed in the same year, 1861. When she herself died, her son Lord Ronald Gower was with her. Her last words were, "I think I shall sleep now; I am so tired."22 Mother and son had a warm and close relationship, which gave him the comfort and strength to be one of the few homosexuals in the Victorian period who could hold his head high. It was known that he lived with a man called Frank Hird, whom he had adopted, and it was rumoured that he was the model for Lord Henry Wootten in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. But he was not driven into exile, perhaps because, unlike the Duke of Beaufort's sons and Wilde himself, Gower was discreet. Scandal never approached him. Duchess Harriet probably knew all there was to know of his life, and understood him. "She would enter into whatever one did or felt," he wrote later, "whether in sorrow or in joy."23
Her other son succeeded as 3rd Duke of Sutherland (1828-1892), who by this time possessed the entire county of Sutherland (by virtue of his earldom). He built his own private railway (called "The Duke of Sutherland's") which remained in the family until nationalisation in 1950, and even dug (unsuccessfully) for gold. One is bound to wonder what on earth he could possibly have done with it. He is otherwise chiefly remembered for having popularised the cigarette and flaunted the taboo which did not allow smoking in public places.24
He married twice. The first wife, Annie, was created Countess of Cromartie in her own right, and is the ancestress of the present Earl of Cromartie. She was not an easy woman to live with. Lady Barker found her religious fervour and intense toadyism "horribly disgusting",25 and her daughter-in-law recalled that she lived in two rooms of Stafford House, lying on a sofa under a red silk eiderdown, and surrounded by Minah birds and parrots, "which perched all over the room and on the head of the old retriever".26 She dined alone every day, always on chicken. She was an angel compared with her successor.
Duchess Annie died in November 1888. The last ten years had not been happy. She viewed with apprehension the appearance of a Mrs Blair, who was spending far too much time in the Duke's company, and seemed to have gained control over his every intention. She feared that the Duke might marry Mrs Blair after her death, and intimated as much to her son, Lord Stafford. None of the family could stand Mrs Blair, a vulgar, malicious woman, with cunning bristling at her finger-tips. They could not have known that she would be their stepmother so soon.
The Duke married Mrs Blair in Florida only three months after Annie's death. Society turned its well-trained back. In the first place the "liaison" had been the subject of gossip for years, which was crime enough, and in the second they should have waited the customary twelve months before insulting the dead woman's memory. There was worse to come.
Duchess Annie had left her wardrobe to her daughter Lady Alexandra, with specific instructions that she and she only was to have the keys to boxes containing her clothes. Within two hours of the new Duchess's arrival at Stafford House on the Mall, she had taken charge of her predecessor's wardrobe, and thereafter went around in her clothes and underwear. She contrived to get her stepson Lord Stafford and his wife Millie out of Lilleshall, Staffordshire, where they were living, and to confiscate all their furniture. The Duke set in motion legal actions to disentail some of the Sutherland estate to be given to his new wife. With these and other schemes afoot, an impassable breach opened between the Duke on one side, and his son and daughter on the other. Lord Stafford refused to shake his stepmother's hand, Lady Alexandra refused to be under the same roof with her. The Duke could not be made to see that this "female" was a wicked woman.
Duchess Blair's intention was to be accepted by society; this could not happen so long as she was not accepted by her husband's family. Her other intention was grim and black - she set about gaining possession of all the Sutherland property for herself in the long
term, at the expense of the rightful heirs, and in the short term, to lay her hands on as much of his money as she could. The second was the easier task. She persuaded the Duke that his son had too great an allowance; he obediently reduced it, and the son was forced to live elsewhere as a result. The difference was pocketed by herself. She then persuaded him that his servants were robbing him, that his household expenses were too high, and that she could save on them if he would let her. She said the expenses amounted to £18,000 a year, and she could run the households more efficiently on that herself. (In fact, the expenses were only £14,000 a year.) He gave her the money, she dismissed the servants, employed new ones of her own choosing, and ran the households personally, for about £10,000 a year. The other £8,000 went into her private bank account, without her husband's knowledge.
The long-term aims were more difficult. It was essential to Duchess Blair's plan that the Duke and his children should be estranged. She set about poisoning his mind against them, so that he would gradually agree to disinheriting them and giving her everything instead. She destroyed some of their letters, interpreted others in her own way. The result was that by the beginning of 1892, the Duke, entirely in her control, was his own son's mortal enemy, threatening to injure him as much as was in his power (and that was very much indeed). Lady Alexandra had meanwhile died from the strain of it all, while the Duke and his son squabbled as to who should pay her doctor's bills.
She went so far as to publish a pamphlet giving her jaundiced version of events over the previous two years, which her stepson was bound to answer. There is a copy with his pencilled comments in the margin, "infernal lie", "this is actionable" and so on. The Duke then decided to amend his will in his wife's favour. The letter of instruction to the solicitors was written in her hand, and the draft of the new will was also in her hand. It gave her all his personal estate, every item in the great houses of Trentham, Lilleshall, Tittensor, Stafford House and Dunrobin Castle, apart from the heirlooms which he could not leave away from his son, plus the exclusive right to use family jewels in her lifetime. He was about to disentail Lilleshall and leave that to her as well, but he died before he could put it into effect.27
The Dukes Page 44