He was succeeded by his son as 5th Duke of Montrose (1852- 1925), on whose death the family estates were decimated to meet taxation. His wife, Hermione, was a grand-daughter of the sad 12th Duke of Somerset, thus bringing into the Montrose genes the blood of that ill-fated man.
The 6th Duke of Montrose (1878-1954), A.D.C. to George V (as had been his father), was the sailor Duke, a Knight of the Thistle, and C.V.O. Among his more esoteric accomplishments was the first-ever film of a total eclipse of the sun, which he took in India in 1899, and the invention of the first aircraft carrier. More significantly, he demonstrated in bold lines the Graham political leanings by working as chairman of the Scottish Nationalist Party, although it is fair to say that the independence he wanted for Scotland was relative and limited, not absolute. He probably inherited his deafness from an ancestral propensity. He married a daughter of the 12th Duke of Hamilton, and their son is the present Rhodesian Duke.
Their grandson is heir to the titles, Marquess of Graham, married to a Canadian and living on Graham land in Scotland, of which about 10,000 acres remain. Lord Graham, enthusiastic in the Moral Rearmament movement, is caretaker of the relics of the Marquess of Montrose, that most tolerant and generous of men, to whom M.RA. would have been anathema.
* * *
While the Marquess was fighting for the King in Scotland, with sensational success, the 2nd Earl of Manchester (1602-1671) was fighting somewhat half-heartedly for Cromwell in England, with no success to speak of. Despondency overwhelmed him, as he realised "if we beat the king ninety-nine times, he is king still, and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves".23 His personality was not made for the burden of war. Like Montrose, he most wanted a peaceful constitutional monarchy, yet he found himself on the opposite side to the Marquess. Meekness and a gentle nature fashioned his attitudes, and although he was a Puritan, he was no extreme ascetic. Softness of temper endeared him to all except Cromwell, who grew steadily exasperated with his mildness, and charged him with waging the war incompetently. Neglect and incapacity were levelled against him by the furious Cromwell, who, according to Clarendon, "hated him above all men, and desired to have taken away his life".24 He even accused the earl of cowardice, which was not justified. In truth, Manchester was sick to death with the war, which he secretly realised was futile because it was not lawful. However reasonable might be the grievances of the Puritans, they were outside the law in rebellion against the King. Manchester was more principled than Cromwell, and he was, after all, from an illustrious family of lawyers; he knew what he was talking about.
From the beginning, Manchester had no stomach for rebellion. He was convinced that the King was in error, but he was brought into open opposition by one of Charles's grossest blunders, and one of the most direct causes of the Civil War. The King had entered the House of Commons and attempted to arrest five of the members, charging them with treason. The Earl of Manchester was one of the five. Clarendon tells the story vividly :
"On 3 January 1642 he accused Lord Mandeville (later Earl of Manchester) and five members of the House of Commons - including Pym, Hampden, Heselrige and Holies - of high treason. The next day he went himself to arrest them, taking with him a file of musketeers. But the news had gone before him, and as Charles entered the House of Commons the five members were already on their way by boat to a safe refuge in the City. When the king looked round the House and saw that his enemies had fled, he called on the Speaker to tell him where they had gone, but the Speaker fell on his knees and answered: 'May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am.' Charles, knew that his coup had failed. 'Well,' he said, 'since I see all the birds are flown, I do expect from you that you shall send them unto me as soon as they return hither', and he left the House as abruptly as he had come."25
The next time Charles went to the Palace of Westminster, it was to stand trial.
Manchester was not suited by disposition to those tempestuous times; he could not call upon a reserve of hatred or ferocity to carry him through. Cromwell could stand it no longer, and got rid of him. "He was at last dismissed, and removed from any trust for no other reason, but because he was not wicked enough."26
He opposed the ordinance to place the King on trial with the strongest resolution of his career, and had no part in his execution. He was active in bringing about the Restoration, bearing the Sword of State at Charles II's coronation in 1661, and he was on the bench which tried the regicides. History has allowed him a decent repentance.
If anything proved that he preferred the fireside to the battlefront, it was the Earl of Manchester's marriages. He married no less than five times (the first four wives all died), three of them members of the same family. He was the husband in turn of the Earl of Warwick's daughter, the Earl of Warwick's sister, and the Earl of Warwick's wife.
Manchester, whose family name was Montagu, was descended from Sir Edward Montagu (1532-1602) of Boughton in Northamptonshire. Sir Edward's father, a Lord Chief Justice, had refused to recognise the patent which created Edward Seymour 1st Duke of Somerset (as it had been created by Seymour himself), and had recognised Lady Jane Grey as Queen (for which he later apologised). In both cases, he established the family tradition of strict legal probity on which this line of lawyers has prided itself. He bought Boughton House in 1528. The second Sir Edward Montagu had six sons, of whom the first was created Baron Montagu of Boughton and was ancestor to the Dukes of Montagu. The title is now extinct, but the Montagu lands, including Boughton House, passed by marriage into the Duke of Buccleuch's family; the Buccleuch of today lives at Boughton. The third son, Sydney Montagu, was ancestor of the earls of Sandwich, and the second son was Henry Montagu, Earl of Manchester and ancestor of the dukes of Manchester. The Montagu name survives today not only in the dukedom of Manchester and that of Buccleuch (Montagu-Douglas-Scott), but also in the family name of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (Douglas-Scott-Montagu). All three men are descended from Sir Edward.
The Manchester family claims an ultimate descent from one Drogo de Monte Acuto, who came with the Conqueror, and all Dukes of Manchester since 1855 have borne the name "Drogo" in recognition of the fact. It is, however, entirely fanciful. They are actually descended from a man called Richard Ladde, who changed his name to "Montagu" about 1447. Nobody knows why.27
We shall see that the Manchesters have long accepted an erroneous version of the derivation of their principal title as well.
Henry Montagu was created Baron Kimbolton and Viscount Man- deville in 1620, and Earl of Manchester in 1626. He had shortly before, in 1619 or 1620, bought from the Wingfield family a handsome residence in Huntingdonshire called Kimbolton Castle, notable as a place where Catherine of Aragon had been imprisoned and spent the last ten years of her life. It had previously been the ancient seat of the Mendevils. Thus, when Henry Montagu bought the post of Lord High Treasurer of England for £20,000 from the Duke of Buckingham, who traded blatantly in political offices and peerage titles to fill the King's purse, he was told the position carried a peerage with it, so he chose as his titles the name of his new home, and the name of its previous owners — Kimbolton and Mandeville.[15] In effect, he bought himself into the peerage, as others did in different ways. Only ten months later, Mandeville had to relinquish this office, but the peerage titles were there to stay.
Five years after that, he was raised still higher as 1st Earl of Manchester. It has long been assumed, even by the dukes of Manchester themselves, that this title had nothing whatever to do with the cotton- spinning industrial city in the north of England. Ten miles from Kimbolton Castle is a little place called Godmanchester, which is supposed to have given its name to the Earl, who then shortened it. One only has to consult the patent roll of 1626 to see that this is wrong. Henry Montagu is quite clearly Earl of Manchester in the county of Lancaster, in spite of his nev
er having been near the place. Godmanchester in Huntingdonshire is a red herring. The most that can be said is that the local village, by an association of ideas, suggested "Manchester" to his mind for want of any better alternative.
Montagu had first come to notice as a lawyer and a judge. In 1616 he had opened the case against Lord and Lady Somerset in their trial for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. He was an assiduous member of the Star Chamber, noted for his lawyer's impartiality, equal in condemnation of Puritan and Papist. He became one of Charles I's most trusted advisers, his probity unquestioned. Later he was Lord Privy Seal and Speaker of the House of Lords. Theologically deeply learned, Manchester published a Protestant treatise which he called Contemplationes Mortis et Immortalitatis, in dignified and persuasive prose. It first appeared in 1631 running into fifteen editions by 1688. Hand in hand with piety, he was drunk with every meal.28
His son was the 2nd Earl, Cromwell's reluctant lieutenant, and his grandson 3rd Earl of Manchester fought as Captain in the Duke of Monmouth's regiment of 1666.
The 4th Earl was created 1st Duke of Manchester (1662-1722), though it is not at all easy to see why. He had been a lifelong supporter of William of Orange since the two met in Europe in 1685 (the Earl was then twenty-three years old), demonstrating his support by bearing St Edward's staff at the coronation of William and Mary in 1689. His life carries no surprises. In common with father, grandfather, and back to Sir Edward Montagu, he revered the constitution and loved the process of law. Nevertheless, as Ambassador to Venice and Paris successively, he does not appear to have done very well, meeting with rebuffs and evasions in his diplomacy, so that his dukedom, conferred by George I in 1719, can only have been a prize for trying.
Belle Montagu is remembered by those who wish to draw from her life a lesson in the duplicity and cunning of women. She was a daughter of the Duke of Montagu, and grand-daughter of the great Marlborough. She conceived a passion for the handsome twenty- three-year-old 2nd Duke of Manchester (1700-1739), to whom she was, of course, distantly related. "Belle is at this instant in the para- disal state of receiving visits every day from a passionate lover, who is her first love", wrote one lady. There was a story, unattested but fascinating, that the Duke was so insane with love that he shut himself into a room with a pair of loaded pistols and determined to kill himself if she would not have him. Unfortunately, his aim was not good. The first shot took away his right eye and some bone. The second shot shattered his jaw. He then tried to string himself from the ceiling. Servants came to his rescue, and Belle was so impressed she consented to marry him then and there. Certainly they were married very quickly, in April of that year, and certainly they were miserably unhappy within six months. Belle gave her husband a dreadful time. "The Duchess of Manchester frets, shrugs, and barks there as usual; but whether Her Grace has swallow'd or spit out again the tips of all the noses she has bit off since you left England, I am unable to inform you. The only reason why she has never deprived her dear Duke of his, I suppose, is that she hopes one time or other to lead him by it."29 So wrote Lord Hervey to Henry Fox, eight years after the marriage. Elsewhere he refers to them as the she-tiger and the jackass.
Belle must have been a trying woman. Apart from her habit of coming down to breakfast with a parrot, a monkey and a lapdog,30 she was pursued by enslaved men. She showed no remorse when her husband, to whom her indifference was now public knowledge, died at the age of thirty-nine, leaving her only the furniture of two upstairs rooms and everything else to his brother. Within a year the poor Earl of Scarborough was smitten with a passion for her which ended in his suicide. (Probably this story has become confused with the unsubstantiated account of the Duke's mania; Scarborough definitely did die.) He had apparently entrusted to her a state secret which she had foolishly divulged in gossip, leaving the man no choice but to kill himself.31 Or he may have died for love of her. A few years afterwards she married an obscure Irishman called Hussey, for whom she obtained a suitable ennoblement. Charles Hanbury Williams drily noted : "How slight the difference is between The Duchess and the Hussey."
The Duke had meanwhile been succeeded by his brother as 3rd Duke of Manchester (1710-1762), whose son the 4th Duke (1737- 1788) deserves attention for having given London one of its famous squares. He built himself a town house in 1776, called it Manchester House, and the square front Manchester Square. The house now holds the Wallace Collection and has changed its name; the square is still the same, however, as are Manchester Street, Mandeville Place, and now the Mandeville Hotel.
Politically, the 4th Duke was a Whig, and an estimable man, although Wraxall speaks disparagingly of him. He gave generous support to the colonists throughout the American War of Independence, being one of the few to agree wholeheartedly with the Duke of Richmond's progressive views in the matter. He voted for Richmond's motion of 5th March 1776 to suspend hostilities with the colonists, and again on 23rd March his motion requesting the withdrawal of troops from America. In 1779 he predicted that the same trouble would eventually occur in Ireland.
Manchester was appointed Lord Lieutenant for the county of Huntingdonshire and, intriguingly, High Steward of Godmanchester. It must surely be from this time that the confusion as to the origin of the title dates. He died from a violent three-day fever after catching a chill watching cricket at Brighton.
So did his son, the 5th Duke (1771-1843), who continued his father's enlightened policies, particularly as Governor of Jamaica for nearly twenty years (1808-1827). In the face of vigorous opposition from the sugar and coffee planters, the Duke of Manchester introduced a number of reforms for the benefit of black slaves. To propose that whips should not be carried in the streets, and that women should be exempt from flogging may not now seem aggressively socialist, but it was a brave man who would take the side of the slaves even in a measured degree at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Another of the Duke's attitudes, of which there is also thankfully no vestige today, was that extraordinary indifference to the affairs of his own family, that impenetrable starchiness of the paterfamilias which we so often find in the aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A glimpse of it is afforded in 1822, when the Duke's son and heir, Lord Mandeville, announced his engagement. A lady approached the Duke and complimented him, making polite phrases about young Mandeville's excellent character, talents, manners, etc., until the Duke interrupted her to say that he knew little or nothing of the young man.32 Perhaps his accident two years before had had some effect; he had fallen out of his carriage and fractured his skull. Or perhaps he simply was not interested in the boy, who reminded him of his notorious wife and their unhappy marriage. She had been a daughter of Jane, Duchess of Gordon, and had become the archetype of the Duchess who really did elope with her footman, some time before 1812. As for the Duke, he was widely regarded as a splendid-looking man. One woman went so far as to describe him as "the most beautiful statue-like person that ever was seen in flesh and blood".83
With the coming of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Manchester enter a period when they are leaders of the "fast set", taking their cue from the Prince of Wales, and viewed askance by the better-behaved ducal families. The Abercorns, their neighbours in London, darkly instructed their children that the Manchester's were "worldly".34 None of this volatility within the social scale was achieved by the dukes; the 7th Duke of Manchester (1823-1890) was "a well-intentioned bore", and his laboursome book, Court and Society, corroborates the judgement. But his wife was a different matter. It was she who brought zest and sparkle to the Manchester set and made it "fast", and who, with her driving ambition, lifted her dull husband from the shadows. She was Louise von Alten, a German countess, gloriously beautiful, and eventually to be known as the "Double Duchess". We have already met her as the Duchess of Devonshire. She married the Duke of Devonshire forty years after she married the Duke of Manchester, but even before that she exerted a powerful influence over her retiring proteg6, who
was far more intelligent than her husband and far more worthy of her ambitions. Louise's spell has not yet quite evaporated in the last quarter of the twentieth century, while the two husbands, whom she made shine, have grown dim with time.
The death of Louise in 1911 really did mark the end of an era; for once the cliche is appropriate. Three years later the Great War smashed the aristocratic way of life with indiscriminate vengeance, and the like of Louise von Alten was not to be seen again. On a domestic scale, her death also marked a profound change in the Manchester family (although it is true to say the Devonshires have gone on much as before). In the last hundred years, the Dukes of Manchester have gradually divorced themselves from English life, have married colossally wealthy foreign heiresses and taken their money abroad. Kimbolton Castle, which gave them one of their titles, is now a grammar school. The 9th Duke of Manchester very neatly made the last flamboyant gesture of the old style at about the same date that Louise died; he challenged Crown Prince Willie of Germany to a duel, because the man had behaved like a cad.35 Willie did not accept, but it must be one of the last such challenges seriously made in our history. Characteristically, Manchester was most concerned that the Crown Prince should not refuse simply because his rank as Duke was not sufficiently elevated for the German to accept with honour. Only ten or twenty years later, everyone would have laughed the man to scorn.
The Dukes Page 52