The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (7 page)

All I have ever seen of it is the vast wall in front, with the rustic columns at the great gate, through which an old porter peers sometimes with a fat and gloomy red face – and over the wall the garret and bedroom windows, and the chimneys,
out of which there seldom comes any smoke now. For the present Lord Steyne lives at Naples, preferring the view of the Bay and Capri and Vesuvius to the dreary aspect of the wall in Gaunt Square.

The writer E. Beresford Chancellor was one of the few people allowed to visit Harcourt House. He wrote of the house in his 1908 book,
The Private Palaces of London Past and Present
:

…nothing could have exceeded the dreariness of its interior, except perhaps the gloom which sat perpetually on its outward walls. The very size of its rooms, and the remains of their former magnificence, with their elaborately carved and moulded cornices; their ceilings painted ‘en grisaille’ and their fine old chimneypieces, added to the sense of desolation which seemed to have irrevocably settled on the whole place.

As if the towering surrounding walls and spiked entrance gates were not enough, the 5th Duke had tall iron and glass screens built round the garden of Harcourt House to shield him from the curious eyes of his neighbours. The screens were a massive 80 feet high by 200 feet long, and presented an extraordinary sight. The duke’s fear of public appearances was such that he took most of his exercise within his private garden, which had a large, circular path running round it for precisely this purpose. Little else existed in the garden save for a few stunted trees and some blackened grass that pushed up in miserable patches around the path. The basement of the house was taken up almost entirely by a huge bathroom
containing various baths, in which the duke spent a great deal of time trying out vapour treatments for his mysterious skin disease. A trapdoor from this bathroom led directly up to his bedroom above.

Although he was always shy, in his youth the 5th Duke of Portland had not been the eccentric recluse that he was to become in later years. Known to his friends and family as Lord John, he joined the army in 1818 to serve a relatively undistinguished career, becoming lieutenant and captain in the Grenadier Guards in 1830. On the death of his elder brother in 1824, he succeeded him as heir-apparent to the dukedom, taking the title of Marquess of Titchfield. He also – reluctantly – replaced his brother as Tory MP for King’s Lynn. On the day he was elected, he did not even attend the hustings: his uncle, Lord William Bentinck, filled his place. Sir William Folkes (who lost to the marquess by 177 to 89 votes) remarked, somewhat caustically:

To the present Marquess I feel not the slightest hostility. He is, however, a perfect stranger to you; you have never seen him – perhaps you never will see him; and I must say that had it not been for that most useful work ‘The Peerage’ I should never have known that such a person existed.

In the event, the marquess served as MP for only two years, gladly giving up the seat to his uncle Lord William, having little taste for active politics. He even delegated the writing of his farewell speech to his father, the 4th Duke.

Timid and endlessly plagued by mysterious ailments, Lord John never matched up to his brilliant younger brother. On
the face of it, Lord George seemed a much better embodiment of the Cavendish-Bentinck tradition of political and public service, begun by the original Hans-Willem Bentinck, and epitomized by the 3rd Duke of Portland, who had twice been prime minister of Great Britain. The old 4th Duke was not slow to express his impatience at the shortcomings of his heir as compared to his younger son, and rumour had it that relations between the marquess and his father were less than cordial. It was an odd circumstance that, when the old duke died in 1854, Lord John was absent from the funeral. A contemporary newspaper report stated simply that ‘the present Duke of Portland was prevented by illness from attending’. Nor was the new heir to the dukedom a favourite of his mother: the old duchess never forgave Lord John for surviving her favourite eldest son, and the marquess was noticeably absent from her funeral as well.

As far as the female sex was concerned, there was only one woman whose name was publicly linked to the 5th Duke. This was the opera singer Adelaide Kemble, with whom the duke fell in love when he was Marquess of Titchfield. Adelaide was the strikingly handsome younger daughter of the actor Charles Kemble. Her aunt, Sarah Siddons, was the most famous stage actress of the age. So intense were the marquess’ feelings that he would haunt the Opera House at Covent Garden when Adelaide was performing, sending her gifts and passionate letters. He commissioned the fashionable society portraitist, John Hayter, to reproduce Adelaide’s likeness from every angle, lending the artist his private box at the Opera House to enable him the better to study his subject. Unfortunately, the marquess’ passion for the stately diva was
unreturned. When he did, finally, pluck up the courage to offer her his hand, he was rejected. This was probably for the very good reason that Adelaide was, at that point, engaged to another man: she married the businessman Edward John Sartoris in 1843, whereupon she retired from her brief, but brilliant, stage career. Called to Cavendish Square by urgent dispatch one windy evening, the portraitist Hayter found the marquess icily alone in the gloom of the drawing room at Harcourt House. Every one of the dozens of portraits of Adelaide that hung in the room had been turned to face the wall. ‘Take them, Hayter,’ said the marquess, with a grandly desolate sweep of the arm. The artist duly took away the offending paintings, which remained with him long after the 5th Duke’s death and until his own, whereupon they reverted to Welbeck Abbey. There they hang to this day, a melancholy testimony to the 5th Duke’s unrequited passion.

After the Adelaide affair, the 5th Duke seemed – at least, to the outside world – to take no further interest in women. This led to a certain amount of speculation. ‘None of the three Bentinck brothers was married, and none of them was likely to marry,’ wrote Lady Londonderry, a family friend, without further comment. It was rumoured that there was some mysterious physical or psychological reason why the 5th Duke could not marry or have children. In recent years, it has been mooted that he was a repressed homosexual.

In the winter of 1851–2, the duke was involved in a serious accident, in which the wheel of a horse-drawn cab actually passed over his head, injuring him severely. From that moment on, he could no longer bear to sit on a horse or listen to music. Already fragile in health, he became a veritable
hypochondriac. In the view of his closest friends, this was the point at which his eccentricity started to increase.

Whether because of his rejection by Adelaide Kemble, the strange circumstances of his younger brother’s sudden death, the physical or psychological consequences of his carriage accident or some other unknown cause, the marquess began progressively to withdraw into his own, private phantasmagoria of shadows. Until 1864, he was most often to be found at Harcourt House rather than Welbeck Abbey. (The fact that the duke resided mainly in London until 1864, the year of T. C. Druce’s supposed death, was cited in support of the double-identity theory.) A tall, spare figure, a good five feet nine inches in height,
*
his Grace was notorious for his sallow complexion, said to be a side-effect of his skin complaint.

That the 5th Duke suffered from some form of skin disease is certain, but the precise nature of the ailment remains a mystery. References to the duke’s ‘unhealthy pallor’ are numerous, and he appears from his behaviour – including his preference for darkened rooms, blinded carriages and underground tunnels – to have been extremely chary of daylight. There was speculation in the newspapers that he suffered from smallpox, and his wig-maker believed that he had a form of eczema. In one of his letters the duke referred to an ‘intense irritation of the skin’, incurable by medication, relief from which could only be obtained by bathing in scalding then cold water, bleeding with a lancet, or sleeping between wet sheets. One of his valets, Henry Powell, recollected that the eruptions – which took place very frequently, especially in the
springtime – caused the duke great inconvenience. At such times, ‘he could not bear to have his clothes on, and would wear loose flannel trousers and a jacket’.

Long averse to red meat, the duke in later years took to dining on chicken alone – in the morning and evening only, and never at lunchtime. This was, of course, exactly the reverse of Druce, who ate only at lunchtime (and also disliked red meat), and it therefore became another argument to support the idea that the two men were one and the same person. Like Druce, the 5th Duke was abstemious in the extreme: he was a non-smoker, and had a marked dislike of alcohol, save for the occasional glass of champagne. His dress, always eccentric, became increasingly peculiar. Already famed for his tall silk hat and stiff, upturned collars, he took to carrying around with him the umbrella for which he became notorious. He started to tie his trousers up around his ankles in the fashion of a navvy, no doubt inspired by the habit of the workmen toiling in the mud at Welbeck Abbey.

All of the 5th Duke’s clothes were supplied by Messrs Batt & Co. of Lower Seymour Street, Portman Square. He was the best customer they ever had. Years later, the son of the firm, Mr Charles Batt, recalled how the duke always bought his clothes in sets: three sets of overcoats and frock coats, twelve pairs of trousers, thirty night-caps, and sixty pieces of under-linen at a time. The peculiarity of the sets of coats was that the second had to be a trifle larger than the first, and the third a trifle larger than the second. This enabled the duke to put on and take off extra coats, according to the weather. If it froze, the duke would wear all six coats at once – the overcoats on top of the frock coats. They were distinguished by tabs of
different colours for each set of coats (green for the first set, blue for the second and red for the third). Within each set, they were identified by the number of tabs (one tab for the first coat, two for the second and three for the third). In his
Reminiscences of the Turf
, the trainer and jockey William Day recalled of the 5th Duke:

He once came to Danesbury in the height of summer, dressed in a long, heavy sable fur coat, that nearly touched the ground when he stood erect – a garment I should have thought more calculated to resist the inclemency of a Siberian winter than the overpowering heat of a midsummer day.

The duke’s trousers were always made of the same grey fabric, of different thicknesses for summer and winter. Once, he returned twelve pairs of trousers because they weighed an ounce and a half more than those of the year before. After this, Messrs Batt & Co. bought a pair of scales, and made the clothes to weight, as well as measure. His under-linen was made of silk, embroidered with the ducal coronet, the initials ‘S.P.’ (for ‘Scott-Portland’), the number of the set, and the year of delivery. Occasionally, sets with other, unexplained initials were ordered – as when the duke asked for a new ‘L.S.’ set to be delivered with the ‘coronet’ set, to weigh in at 3 ounces heavier than the previous set.

The 5th Duke was also very fond of wigs: bouffant creations that made his long, lean face more cadaverous still. Thomas Keetley, his coachman, recalled that one day he was riding with him in the park at Welbeck during the fawning season when a fawn suddenly sprang out of the bracken and
frightened the duke’s pony, which bolted off under a tree. A branch knocked off both the duke’s hat and wig – revealing that his Grace was quite bald underneath. The duke’s chosen wig-maker was none other than Messrs Truefitt & Co. of Bond Street, who also numbered T. C. Druce among their clients. The foreman of the firm had a vivid recollection of his first wig-fitting visit to Harcourt House in the 1850s. On arriving at the forbidding front door of the duke’s London residence at eight o’clock in the morning, the wig-maker spied an ancient butler peering at him through the glass. After a tremendous amount of unbolting of rusty locks, the door was opened, and he was escorted upstairs to a room honeycombed with pigeonholes. Each pigeonhole contained a wig – no fewer than five or six hundred of them in all. In the half-lit chamber sat the duke, face muffled, waiting to be fitted. Every six months or so, the wig-maker would be summoned. The ritual was always the same: an appointment at eight o’clock sharp in the morning, the same ancient butler, the same journey to the wig-lined room, and the duke waiting alone in the darkened room. There was never any conversation, save for instructions relating to the fitting of the wig.

The extreme fastidiousness manifested by the 5th Duke in his dress was reflected in his personal habits. His Grace’s servants were frequently called upon on Sundays to help him arrange and rearrange his books, of which he had a vast number. He would file great quantities of newspapers, carefully marked and arranged in bundles. His papers were always ironed before they were handed to him. If the 5th Duke wanted money – whether silver or coppers – every coin had to be carefully washed before he would touch it. (Cab drivers
frequently thought the sparkling coppers too good to be true.) Perhaps with the memory of his terrible accident all too fresh in his mind, his Grace would refuse to step into a new carriage until the carriage-maker had taken a turn in it first, to demonstrate that it was safe.

After 1864, the duke spent more and more time at Welbeck Abbey. It was at this time that he embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious programme of building works: new lodges, workmen’s dwellings, a new riding school, a glass-covered exercise ground (known as ‘the Gallop’, over a quarter of a mile long), stables, dairies, workshops, a church, museum and picture gallery – to say nothing of the labyrinth of passages underground, in which his Grace might be found wandering at any hour of day or night. The duke, in fact, appeared to be withdrawing gradually from all human contact.

Communication with staff was conducted via written notes placed in heavy brass letter boxes outside the ducal suite – the very boxes which were later to be noted by the sharp-eyed, six-year-old Ottoline, on her first visit to Welbeck. When the duke wished to converse with a servant, he would place a note in the letter box and ring his bell. In the room he usually occupied was a large trapdoor, set in the floor. If his Grace wanted the suite to be cleaned, he would place a memorandum to this effect in his letter box, pull the bell and disappear through the trapdoor, until the work was completed. The duke’s bedroom, moreover, was most curiously arranged: the bed was large, square and shut in with doors, so that when they were closed, it was impossible to tell if the bed were occupied or not. As his own valet conceded, ‘He might have been in the house for weeks at a time without my being aware of it. I only knew
he was there by getting written orders, either to provide his meals or other attentions.’