White did not confine his campaign to lambasting the Devonshires’ wealth and privilege: he also appealed to the electorate’s hopes for the post-war world. His nine-point manifesto included ‘common ownership of the great industrial and natural resources of the country’ and rapid demobilization and civil retraining programmes for members of the armed forces. Most popular of all was the Beveridge Plan, Labour’s blueprint to build a welfare state to combat ‘Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness’ – the sins of the ‘Wicked Thirties’.
By comparison, Billy’s campaign was timidly lacklustre. Aimed at preserving the status quo, his slogan was, ‘A vote for Hartington is a vote for Churchill’.
In a misguided attempt to bolster Billy’s vote, Churchill, the Prime Minister, wrote him an open letter midway through the campaign. Its sentiments, harking back as they did to a feudal past, played straight into the hands of his opponent.
My dear Hartington
I see that they are attacking you because your family have been identified for about 300 years with the Parliamentary representation of West Derbyshire. It ought, on the contrary, to be a matter of pride to the constituency to have such long traditions of constancy and fidelity through so many changing scenes and circumstances.
Moreover, it is an historical fact that your family and the people of West Derby have acted together on every great occasion in this long period of our history on the side of the people’s rights and progress.
It was so in the revolution of 1688, which finally established the system of Constitutional Monarchy under which we have enjoyed so many blessings. It was so at the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832, which laid the foundations of the modern electorate. It was so in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and in the extension of the franchise in 1884.
Once again it is the old cause of freedom and progress that is being fought for, though this time not only among the hills of West Derbyshire, but in the devastating world war.
As the campaign drew to a close, Billy could see that he was likely to lose. Confiding in Kick, he predicted a huge swing to Labour. ‘It’s all very upsetting,’ Kick wrote to her family, ‘they know just what the working people want to hear and they give it to them. There is no doubt about it, there is a terrific swing to the left. People want to hear about how much money they are going to get out of the Beveridge Plan, not how much money the Tory government is spending on the war.’
On polling day, a large crowd gathered outside the Counting Station at Matlock Town Hall. The result – a massive swing to the Socialists, as Billy had predicted – astonished Britain. Charles White won by 5,000 votes, almost the same majority Billy’s uncle had achieved in 1938. His victory was hailed by the left-wing Press: ‘It is a blunt intimation that the country wants to see NOW, in the Government’s reconstruction policies, a clearer promise of justice and happiness for the common man,’ ran the Daily Herald’s leader: ‘A world in which men’s minds will be directed to the future rather than to the past: to the prospects of their children, rather than to the accomplishments of their landlords’ ancestors.’
It was a very public humiliation for Billy. Day after day during the campaign he had been forced to stand before his countrymen defending himself against charges of cowardice and upholding his family name. He had failed. Conceding defeat, his overriding desire to put the record straight on the issue that had hurt him the most was evident at the start of his speech: ‘It has been a fierce fight,’ he began. ‘Now I am going out to fight for you at the Front.’
‘It just leaves a bad taste,’ Kick wrote home a few days later from Chatsworth, where she and Billy had retreated to spend one last week together before he returned to his regiment. ‘His father was most disappointed and kept saying: “I don’t know what the people want.” Billy just said, “I do, they don’t want the Cavendishes.” I think it shook his father a bit to hear it from Billy.’
The by-election was a breaking point for Billy. The days spent on the hustings had convinced him that Britain would be a very different place when the war was over. Socialism, he believed, with its swingeing attack on the privileges and power of the aristocracy, its radical agenda of high taxation and nationalization and its nascent proposals for a welfare system that would transfer the obligation of care in the community from the family to the State, threatened to undermine everything the Dukes of Devonshire stood for. As he told Kick, he even doubted whether the family would be able to live at Chatsworth after the war. What was the point, Billy agonized alone, in defending the values and the traditions of a potentially redundant aristocratic dynasty by sacrificing his love for Kick?
A week after the count at Matlock, Kick celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday at Chatsworth. The Duke, sensing that his son was about to do ‘the one thing’, as Kick described, ‘he had always dreaded’, made a point with his present. ‘Received a lovely old leather book from the Duke for my birthday,’ she noted. ‘The Duchess said she had nothing to do with it, and when I opened it up I knew why. It was the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.’
‘I think something will have to be decided one way or another before we both go nuts,’ Kick wrote to her parents on 4 March 1944. ‘Somehow I can’t make myself see that the Lord in Heaven (not the one in question) would make things so difficult.’
Billy had asked Kick to marry him. But he had imposed one condition: that his sons should be raised as Protestants.
Naively, Kick assumed the Vatican would grant her special dispensation to marry. Until the late 1920s, the English Catholic Church had allowed the sons of a mixed-faith marriage to be brought up as Protestants providing the daughters were raised as Catholics. The moment Billy proposed, she wrote to her father asking him to use his connections in the Catholic Church to establish whether the recently revoked law could be applied to her case. Obtaining permission to marry Billy, so she thought, was surely a formality. The Kennedys had become America’s first Catholic family: at the invitation of President Roosevelt they had represented the United States at the Papal Inauguration in 1939. They had even been granted the rare privilege of a private audience with Pope Pius XII afterwards. Kick was stunned when her mother reported back: ‘I do not seem to think Dad can do anything,’ she wrote. ‘He feels terribly sympathetic and so do I and I only wish we could offer some suggestions.’
Rose Kennedy’s letter threw Kick into turmoil. If, as Billy demanded, she refused to raise their children as Catholics, the Catholic Church would not recognize their marriage. The consequences were dire: not only would she be excommunicated, unable to receive Holy Communion or to make an act of confession, but, in marrying without the blessing of her Church, she would be committing fornication, a sin of ‘grave matter’. To deliberately and wilfully turn away from God to commit a sin of ‘grave matter’ was, according to the teachings of St Paul, a mortal sin. By marrying Billy she would be severed from God’s sanctifying grace, condemned to eternal damnation. It left her with a brutal choice: either she gave up Billy, or, if she married him, she would have to face exile from the Catholic Church.
‘She was deeply, deeply religious,’ Janie Compton recalled, ‘it was a fundamental part of her nature.’ It was an aspect of her character that sometimes disconcerted her friends. Ursula Wyndham Quinn remembered sharing a room with her at a country house weekend early in 1944. At bedtime, after they had chatted for a while, Kick knelt down and prayed. What struck Ursula as so peculiar was that she prayed for some fifteen minutes. The next morning, the moment she got up, she prayed again and then went off to Mass. Religious issues peppered her conversation. John White, another of her close friends, jotted down the gist of their religious debates in his diary. ‘Kick calls to me [sic] all birth control is murder,’ he wrote. ‘I say her position is just Catholic Church technique for helping keep membership.’ Later, he recalled her naivety about sex: steeped in the dogma of the Catholic Church, she would refer to it coyly, in the rare moments they discussed it, as ‘the thing the priest say
s not to do’.
Kick’s dilemma was made worse by her mother’s rigid lack of empathy or understanding. To Rose, the thought that any daughter of hers would risk exile from the Catholic Church for the sake of the man she loved was unimaginable. Billy’s intransigence, his refusal to allow Kick to raise their children as Catholics, to her mind represented an intractable obstacle: ‘When both people have been handed something all their lives, how ironic it is that they cannot have what they want most,’ she wrote.
I wonder if the next generation will feel that it is worth sacrificing a life’s happiness for all the old family traditions. So much wealth, titles etc seem to be disappearing. But I understand perfectly the terrific responsibilities and the disappointment of it all. It is Lent now and I am praying morning, noon and night, so do not be exhausting yourself and running your little legs off going to Church, as your first duty is towards your job … We had a letter from someone in Boston whose third cousin watched you go to Communion frequently, so the news has been carried across the waters …
Billy’s mother, the Duchess of Devonshire, was far more sympathetic. She recognized that her eldest son loved Kick and could not bear the thought of him being unhappy. She also understood how wretched Kick felt, realizing that the last thing she wanted to do was to turn Billy down. In an effort to find a solution, the Duchess invited Kick to meet the Reverend Edward Keble Talbot, Chaplain to King George VI. In a letter to her parents, marked confidential, Kick wrote an account of their meeting at Church-dale, the Devonshires’ estate in Derbyshire:
The Duchess with my full knowledge, asked a very great friend of hers, Father Ted Talbot, to come and stay to talk to me … Her idea was for him to explain what the Cavendish family stood for in the English Church. He also took a great deal of trouble to explain to me the fundamental differences between the Anglican and Roman Churches. Of course I explained that something one had been brought up to believe in and which was largely responsible for the character and personality of an individual is a very difficult thing for which to find a substitute. Further, I explained that I had been blessed with so many of this world’s goods that it seemed rather cheap and weak to give in at the first real crisis in my life. Of course both the Duchess and Father Talbot don’t for a minute want me to give up something. They just hoped that I might find the same thing in the Anglican version of Catholicism.
By the end of her stay at Churchdale, Kick, as she told her parents, had made her choice. ‘When I left Churchdale on Tuesday, yesterday, I felt most discouraged and rather sad. I want to do the right thing so badly and yet I hope I’m not giving up the most important thing in my life.’ Billy would not capitulate on the question of the religious upbringing of a future son and heir: forced to choose between Billy and God, Kick had chosen God. ‘Poor Billy is very, very sad,’ her letter continued,
but he sees his duty must come first. He is a fanatic on this subject and I suppose just such a spirit is what has made England great despite the fact that Englishmen are considered so weak-looking etc. If he did give in to me his father has told him he would not be cut off, in fact nothing would happen. They, meaning Mother and Father, would just make the best of it. That makes things even more difficult.
It was the Duchess who captured the heartbreak of Kick’s stay at Churchdale. Maintaining an emotional distance from her own parents, Kick enclosed an extract from the letter Billy’s mother had written to her a few days after she left. ‘I am no good at saying things,’ the Duchess confided,
so I am writing to say how you are always in my thoughts and how I feel for you alone here without your mother and father when you are going through so much and have had such overwhelmingly difficult things to decide about. It is desperately hard that you should have all this great unhappiness with the second front always at the back of one’s mind. I know how lonely you must feel and almost forsaken but we must trust in God that things will come out for the best in the end. I do hope you know how much we love you and if there is even the smallest thing we can do to help you have only to say – and always please come and see me at any time if you feel like it and come and stay. There is always a bed for you – you have only to telephone.
Kick ended her letter to her parents by thanking them: ‘You two have been wonderful and a great strength. I’m sure Mother’s prayers are helping all the time.’
By mid-March, a month after Billy’s defeat at the by-election, the combined weight of the two families had apparently been brought to bear. Both parents believed the marriage was off, that neither Kick nor Billy was prepared to compromise their religious beliefs. But in the coming weeks, as the two of them spent time alone together in London, the truth was they could not bear to let each other go.
Their meetings were brief – snatched when Billy was able to get leave from his regiment. The Second Front – the Allied Forces’ invasion of Europe – was expected at any moment. Frantically, Kick and Billy sought a way around their impasse. Billy came up with one solution, a compromise founded on his belief that, when the war was over, aristocratic titles would have no currency. If, he promised Kick, any future social upheaval were to change Britain’s class system, he would allow her to raise their children as Catholics. But in the event that a dukedom continued to confer the traditional pre-eminence, their children would be brought up as Protestants. Yet whatever their private pact, according to the teachings of the Catholic Church, if Kick went ahead and married Billy, she would still be committing a mortal sin. She was unwilling to stake her State of Grace in the eyes of God on the future – and nebulous – state of Britain.
At the end of March 1944, turning to the Church for guidance, Kick arranged a meeting with Bishop Matthew, the Auxiliary Bishop of Westminster. It was a final attempt on her part to see if she could obtain some sort of dispensation to marry. She went to the meeting with a heavy heart, believing her mission to be impossible. But what the Bishop told her was what she longed to hear. A dispensation was out of the question: as the Bishop explained, it would place the Church in a very difficult position. Instead, he advised Kick that it would be better to go ahead and marry on the basis that dispensation would be given at some point in the future. ‘Of course he wouldn’t guarantee that anything could be done,’ she wrote to her family afterwards. ‘I am certainly not going to count on everything being made OK – I shall only hope for it.’ For the first time, she hinted that she was considering changing her mind. ‘If I do marry Billy within the next two months, please be quite sure that I am doing it with the full knowledge of what I’m doing and that I’m quite happy about it and feel quite sure that I am doing the right thing.’ Crucially, the Bishop had reassured her on the one point she was most anxious about. Contrary to the views of the other senior Churchman who had been consulted, Bishop Matthew advised Kick that if she were to marry Billy she would not be committing a mortal sin. According to his interpretation of canon law, she was not wilfully turning away from God. ‘As my Bishop said,’ she triumphantly informed her parents, ‘“No one can say that you are committing a sin because a sin is done from a selfish motive. What you are doing is done entirely from a non-selfish motive.”’
In the last week of April, after spending three days in Yorkshire with Billy, Kick finally agreed to marry him on his terms. The moment she said yes, it was left to Billy to compose his first – and difficult – letter to the formidable Rose Kennedy. Suspecting that Rose regarded him as the devil incarnate for having caused her daughter’s fall from grace, somehow he had to find the words to explain himself to his future mother-in-law.
Dear Mrs Kennedy
I feel so ashamed at not having written to you before and I hope you won’t think too harshly of me for my bad manners. The situation has changed so much from day to day, and I’m afraid I’ve kept on putting off writing to you until we could reach a decision one way or the other.
I have loved Kick for a long time, but I did try so hard to face the fact that the religious difficulties seemed insurmountable, and
I tried to make up my mind that I should have to make do with second best. I felt too that if she could find someone else she could really be happy with, it would be much better & more satisfactory for her.
But after Christmas I realized that I couldn’t bear to let her go without ever asking her if we couldn’t find a way out and I knew that the time before I should have to go and fight was getting short.
I could not believe, either, that God could really intend two loving people, both of whom wanted to do the right thing, and both of whom were Christians, to miss the opportunity of being happy, and perhaps even useful, together because of the religious squabbles of His human servants several hundred years ago.
I do feel extremely strongly about the religion of my children both from a personal and from a national point of view, otherwise I should never have asked Kick to make such sacrifices in agreeing to their being brought up Anglican.
I know that I should only be justified in allowing my children to be brought up Roman Catholic, if I believed it to be desirable for England to become a Roman Catholic country. Therefore, believing in the National Church of England, as I do very strongly, and having so many advantages, and all the responsibilities that they entail, I am convinced that I should be setting a very bad example if I gave in, and that nothing would justify my doing so.
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 38