The Dukes

by Brian Masters

  * The other three were Welbeck (Duke of Portland), Worksop (Duke of Norfolk), and Thoresby (Duke of Kingston).

  The Duke is not political, and rarely social. He has little connection with other dukes, or with the social zigzagging of London "society". He has never taken part in a coronation. He has no servants. "The fact that I might one day be Newcastle was never discussed," he

  says. "I never gave it a thought."

  * * *

  In the summer of 1889 Princess Louise, eldest daughter of the Prince of Wales and grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, became engaged to the Earl of Fife, an obscure Scottish laird. Her cousin, Princess May of Teck (later Queen Mary), thought it a little odd. "What do you say to Louise's engagement to Lord Fife?" she wrote to her Aunt Augusta. "We are very glad for her because she has liked him for some years, but for a future Royal Princess to marry a subject seems rather strange don't you think so ?" Queen Victoria, who was both sentimental and had a keen eye for the advantages of any proposal, was thoroughly in favour. "It is a very brilliant marriage in a worldly point of view", she wrote, "as he is immensely rich."47 Besides which, he was handsome and likeable. Princess Louise, an apathetic, sickly creature, much given to whining, was unlikely to do better. That Fife was not of royal blood was a mere inconvenience, which the old Queen knew well she could remedy by the simple expedient of elevating him to the highest rank among her subjects. So, on the very day of the marriage, 27th July 1889, Louise's husband became 1st Duke of Fife, holder of the last dukedom to be created. (He had been offered the dukedom of Inverness, but had refused.)48

  The wedding was a splendid, glittering occasion. A royal romance was guaranteed to catch the public imagination, but this was some­thing more. The Princess had not gone abroad to choose some German princeling whom nobody had ever heard of, but had chosen instead a Scot, whom she loved, and the Queen had given her blessing. It was certainly a departure from custom, and cause for wild enthusiasm. The wedding took place in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace, Louise still looking very pale, according to the Queen, who also disapproved of her dress. "She was too plainly dressed", she wrote, "and had her veil over her face, which no Princess ever has and which I think unbecoming and not right." The Queen was quite correct; today her rigid observance of royal practice is adhered to more strictly, as for example when Princess Anne married, with her face uncovered. The Fifes moved into a house in Richmond Park, called Sheen Lodge, where they led a very happy life, and where their two daughters were born.

  The origins of the Fifes was by no means clear. They had extensive land in Scotland (none of it in Fife), were known to be pleasant and obliging, quite harmless, and small in build; one of them had been known as "Creely Duff" or "dwarf-like Duff". Duff was the family name. One theory averred descent from the Macduff Earls of Fife, one of whom is prominent in Shakespeare's Macbeth. But the connection has never successfully been traced. A second version claimed that the Duffs themselves were from a direct line dating from 1404. Unfortunately, a genealogical scholar showed that this theory rested on falsified evidence. In the mausoleum at Duff House, Banff, lay a stone effigy, purporting to be of the first Duff, and carrying the date 1404; the genealogist proved that the effigy had been removed from St Anne's Chapel in 1792, and that the inscription had been tampered with after its arrival at Duff House.49 With the best will, one must conclude that the origin of the Fifes is mysterious. They have always been ardent Scots, which alone would endear them to Queen Victoria; one of them had earth and gravel brought down from Scotland to fill the garden and paths of Fife House in Whitehall, on the Thames, so that he would only need to tread on Scottish soil.50

  Less than two years after their marriage, H.R.H. Princess Louise, Duchess of Fife, and the Duke of Fife, were presented with a sudden crisis of succession which promised to engulf them both. The heir presumptive to the throne of England, Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence, caught influenza and pneumonia, and within a few days lay dead. At his bedside on 14th January 1891 were his mother, the Princess of Wales (soon to be Queen Alexandra), holding his hand for hours on end, his brother Prince George, and his sister and brother-in-law, the Fifes. The tragedy resided not only in the premature death of a handsome and popular prince, but in the doubt which his death cast upon the future. For the heir to the throne, after the Prince of Wales, was Prince George, unmarried and poor in health. Next in line was his sister Louise. His life and his alone separated the throne from the Duchess of Fife, who, highly strung and mouse-like, would scarcely make an ideal Queen. All efforts were now concentrated on getting Prince George married and with a family.

  In the forefront of these endeavours were the Fifes, desperate to avoid the throne. They encouraged Prince George to pursue his dead brother's fiancee, the estimable and ideal Princess May of Teck. Their house at Richmond was especially well suited as a rendezvous, quiet secluded, but very near London. Here the young couple met regularly, prodded by the anxious Fifes. One day the Duchess said to her brother, "Now, Georgie, don't you think you ought to take May into the garden to look at the frogs in the pond?" Beside the pond the future George V proposed to the future Queen Mary and was accepted. May noted in her diary that the Fifes were "delighted".

  In the meantime, something had to be done about the Fifes' own future. They had two daughters, and were unlikely to have more children, which meant that the dukedom would be extinct after only one generation. There was one solution. The dukedom would have to be created again, with special remainder allowing the title to descend through the female line. The Queen obliged, and in 1900 the Duke of Fife became duke a second time; it is this title which is borne by his descendant, the previous dukedom and all other earlier titles being extinct with his death in 1912.In 1905, soon after her father became King, the Duchess was named Princess Royal, which entitled her daughters to carry the style of "Her Highness". They were not a family to be constantly in the public eye, although on one occasion there was no avoiding an avalanche of publicity. In December 1911 the family embarked on the P. & O. steamship Delhi, bound for Bombay. The Fifes were due to disembark in Egypt, whence they were repairing for the Duchess's health, always too fragile to withstand an English winter. On the night of 13th December a furious storm broke. Black clouds poured down torrents of rain, gales whipped up mountainous waves, and at 2 a.m. the ship began to go under. They were some miles off Cape Spartel, on the coast of Morocco. Signals soon brought other ships to the rescue, but the sea was too turbulent to attempt transferring passengers from one ship to another. The only hope was to get them into small craft and make as best one could for the shore. The Princess Royal and her husband refused to leave the Delhi until other women and children had been taken off, by which time the ship was filling fast. They had literally to be dropped from a height and caught in the small boats, wearing only nightclothes, as there had been no time to retrieve personal belongings. Their little boat was swamped by waves, in spite of frantic baling, obliging them to rely on lifebelts. Princess Alix disappeared under the water for a while. Louise tells the story herself in a letter to her brother King George. "We got on alright but waves were huge, they swept down on us and filled the boat, we baled, but not any good, water came up to our knees and she sank! flinging us all out! We floated in our belts - waves like iron walls tore over us, knocked us under, Admiral Cradock gripped my shoulder and saved me! - Thank God my Macduff and children both on beach but had been under too, it was an awful moment, our clothes so heavy, and we were breathless and shivery ... It is an extraordinary nightmare, and we are indeed grateful to be all here and alive still."52

  Once on shore the Fife family walked to the lighthouse, where they were given coffee and whatever assortment of clothing could be found. The Princess Royal sent a telegram : "S.S. Delhi to Queen Alexandra, London. All safe. Louise." They then mounted on mules and, still shivering and drenched, trod their way painfully across rugged country to Tangier. The journey took three hours.03

  The Fifes continued afterwards to Egypt to
resume their holiday, but tragedy struck belatedly when the Duke contracted pleurisy and pneumonia, as a result of which he died, on 29th January 1912. His daughter maintained that the illness had nothing to do with the ship­wreck, but medical opinion was not quick to agree with her.

  In accordance with the terms of the fresh patent of 1900, the Duke was succeeded by his elder daughter as Duchess of Fife.* She married Prince Arthur of Connaught, which had the effect of submerging the Fife dukedom in her other, royal, honours; she was known to the world as H.R.H. Princess Arthur of Connaught. She was the first member of the Royal Family to be matron of a nursing-home, before which she had worked incognito as a nurse and a sister at both University College Hospital and Queen Charlotte's Hospital. Her one son predeceased her, thus spelling the end of the Connaught title, while the Fife dukedom passed on her death in 1959 to the son of her sister, Princess Maud, then Lord Carnegie, now the 3rd Duke of Fife.

  The Duke, born in 1929, chairman of the Amateur Boxing Association, was pursued by newspapers in his twenties as one of the most likely husbands for Princess Margaret, whom he had known since childhood. (Another was Lord Dalkeith, now Duke of Buccleuch.) He, however, spent more time with a ballet dancer called Mary Drage, whose Catholic religion prevented any permanent alliance. As a descendant of George II he was subject to the Royal Marriages Act, which requires the Sovereign's consent to any engagement. In 1956 he married the Hon. Caroline Dewar, daughter of Lord Forteviot, who owned the Dewar Scotch whisky firm. Ten years later they were divorced, on grounds of her adultery. There are two children of the marriage, a boy and a girl. The son, Lord Macduff, born in 1961, is the solitary heir to this last of the dukedoms. He married in 1987.

  *Only two other women have inherited a dukedom - the Duchess of Marl­borough in 1722, and the Duchess of Hamilton in 1651.

  references

  1. Devonshire Collections, 28. 102.

  2. Hist. MSS. Comm., Rutland MSS, Vol. II, pp. 168-75.

  3. Nicholas Pevsner, Derbyshire, p. 141.

  4. Duchess of Rutland, Haddon Hall (pamphlet, 1890), p. 18.

  5. Letters and Papers Henry VIII, Vol. IV, Part iii, p. 2929.

  6. Greville, IV, 9.

  7. Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, Book IX, Ch. 1.

  8. D.N.B.

  9. Wraxall, Posthumous Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 365.

  10. William Pitt, Correspondence, Vol. Ill, p. 477.

  11. Wraxall, Historical Memoirs, p. 367.

  12. ibid., p. 543.

  13. London Chronicle, 24th October 1787.

  14. Wraxall, Hist. Mem., 370.

  15. Town and Country, Vol. II, p. 401 (1770).

  16. Chips Channon, Diaries, p. 142.

  17. Greville, III, 1.

  18. Augustus Hare, In My Solitary Life, p. 252.

  19. Clark E. Bleibtreu, Der Wahre Shakespeare (Munich, 1907).

  20. Cal.S.P.Dom., 1611-18, p. 143.

  21. Eller, pp. 62-6.

  22. Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George II, Vol. II, p. 2.

  23. Letters of Queen Victoria, quoted in Complete Peerage.

  24. Moneypenny, Life of Disraeli, Vol. II, p. 163.

  25. The Stanleys of Alderley, ed. Nancy Mitford.

  26. Greville, VII, 94.

  27. Lord Hervey and His Friends, p. 171.

  28. ibid., p. ,140.

  29. Walpole, XXII, p. 102.

  30. R. A. Kelch, Newcastle: A Duke without Money.

  31. L. B. Namier, England in the Age of the American Revolution.

  32. Kelch, op. cit., pp. 183-4.

  33. Walpole, XVII, 210.

  34. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Works (1822), Vol. II, p. 33.

  35. Walpole, XVIII, 167.

  36. Sanford and Townsend, Great Governing Families of England,

  Vol. I, p. 211.

  37. Lady Paget, quoted in Complete Peerage.

  38. Sunday Express, 15th December 1957.

  39. Daily Sketch, 14th March 1970.

  40. Londonderry Papers, D/Lo/C 234, Duke of Newcastle to Lady

  Londonderry, 13th July 1858.

  41. ibid.., 8th September 1858.

  42. Edith Marchioness of Londonderry, Frances Anne, pp. 291-4.

  43. Illustrated London News, 18th January 1851, p. 37.

  44. Greville, III, 231.

  45. Greville, IV, 156.

  46. Hansard, House of Lords, 3rd December 1830.

  47. James Pope-Hennessey, Queen Mary, pp. 180-1.

  48. Annual Register, 1889.

  49. Genealogist Magazine, 1886.

  50. Old and New London, Vol. Ill, p. 335.

  51. Pope-Hennessey, op. cit., pp. 259-60.

  52. ibid., pp. 462-3.

  The Times, 14th December 1911.

  13. The Legacy of Mary Davies

  Duke of Westminster

  It is commonly supposed that Queen Victoria felt obliged to make Hugh Lupus Grosvenor a duke in 1874, because he was more wealthy than she was. With an income exceeding a £¼ million a year and the most desirable piece of real estate in London, extending over Belgravia and Mayfair, wealth was, for better or worse, the singular most noticeable thing about him. Granville was the first to suggest the elevation. "Has it ever crossed you to make your Cheshire neigh­bour a Duke?" he wrote to Gladstone on 8th February 1874. "Your suggestion about Westminster has often crossed my mind," Gladstone replied, "and I have every disposition to recommend it."1 Accord­ingly, he took the opportunity to include Grosvenor's name on the list for dissolution honours occasioned by his resignation. On 17th February he wrote: "My dear Westminster [he was then Marquess of Westminster], I have received authority from the Queen to place a Dukedom at your disposal and I hope you may accept it, for both you and Lady Westminster will wear it right nobly. With my dying breath, Yours sincerely, W. E. Gladstone." The Marquess replied next day with his acceptance, adding a postscript: "May I venture to say that if we have any option in the matter we should like to retain the title of 'Westminster' and that of 'Earl Grosvenor' for the eldest son as at present."2

  Barely 100 years old, the dukedom of Westminster is therefore a fledgling title; only that of Fife is more recent. Paradoxically, how­ever, the family of Grosvenor in whom it is vested has ancestry stretching back in unbroken male line to the time of the Conqueror, with an authenticity that many a longer-established ducal house might envy. Gilbert le Gros Veneur, Chief Huntsman to William the Conqueror and nephew to Hugh Lupus, William's nephew, gave the family its surname. In 1160 Robert le Grosvenor received a grant of land from the Earl of Chester at Budworth, Co. Chester, where the family settled and has remained ever since. Familiar names in their early history presage a future which they could not have suspected; Sir Robert Grosvenor, who died in 1396, married the widow of one Thomas Belgrave, and in 1450 Raufe Grosvenor married the heiress Joan Eton (or Eaton) of Eaton, Co. Chester. By the late seventeenth century the Grosvenors were a family of great antiquity and con­siderable, though not ostentatious, fortune. They lacked one advantage - a London base. Their property was entirely provincial and they were not well-placed or well-known in the south. A suitable remedy was found in the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Baronet, Member of Parliament for Chester and Mayor of Chester, with the twelve-year-old heiress Mary Davies, of Ebury, Middlesex, whose marriage portion included the manor of Ebury, comfortably close to London. The Ebury property was not particularly remarkable, being largely swamp and lagoon in the south, and poor pasture in the north. Indeed, it was Mary Davies who gained most by the marriage, since the Grosvenors were then far the richer family of the two. And they were shrewd. Sir Thomas knew that the Ebury lands, unexciting as they were, were well-situated and would be ripe for development one day. The date of the marriage was 8th October 1677. The Ebury property is now Belgravia and Mayfair, and it still belongs to Sir Thomas's descendants.

  Ebury was bounded in the south by the river Thames, in the north by the Roman road from London to Bath (now Oxford Street and Bayswater Road), in the east b
y the Tybourne, and in the west by a stream called the Westbourne. In all, it covered 1090 acres, formerly belonging to the Abbey of Westminster, confiscated and redistributed in the time of Henry VIII. The King took what he thought was the best part of it for himself, in 1540, enclosed it and stocked it with deer; this is now Hyde Park. The southern part, sometimes sub­merged at high tide, with islands rising above the highwater mark (the isle of Chesil — Chels-ea; the isle of Bermond = Bermond's-ea; Battersea was another), is now Pimlico and Belgravia. Between 1300 and 1700 the land underwent practically no change at all, being too clayey and waterlogged to permit building. As recently as the begin­ning of the nineteenth century, it was still meadow, an open and rural spot known as "Five Fields" and infested with robbers and footpads (highwaymen). All that had happened in 400 years was that the property had changed hands by purchase, gift and inheritance.

  In 1626 the land was sold to Hugh Awdeley, or Audley (1577- 1662) for £9400. Audley had a reputation for usury and double- dealing, which modern research has gone some way to redress. He was "careful, capable, covetous, but not corrupt".8 Certain it is that he knew how to make money, having increased his own capital some 2000 per cent in his lifetime. He lived so long that he became a legendary figure, pointed at in public; he also succumbed to the whims of old age, changing his will and settlements several times a year. By the terms of the last settlement, dated 1st November 1662, he bequeathed his Middlesex property to his business clerk and nephew, Alexander Davies, and his brother Thomas Davies. Audley died that year, and Alexander bought out his brother's portion of the estate, leaving the whole, some 430 acres, to his infant daughter Mary, who married Sir Thomas Grosvenor. Alexander may have had plans for the land. He was, after all, an ambitious and clever young man, with ideas of his own. But the plague struck him down at the age of thirty, in July 1665, when little Mary was but five months old (she was bom on 17th January 1665).