The Dukes (16 page)

The studious 11th Duke fell in love with Lady Susan Hamilton,
daughter of the 9th Duke of Hamilton, but her elder sister, Lady
Charlotte, had eyes for him herself and, somehow or other, managed
to woo him away to her own side. He was not the kind of man to put
up much resistance, and one daughter was presumably as good as
another. His bad-tempered mother objected to the match, probably
on the grounds that Charlotte was much older than the Duke, but also
possibly from spite; she was only the daughter of an esquire, whereas
the Hamiltons were among the highest in the land. At all events, the
wedding took place in 1800, and Lady Charlotte brought to the
Seymour family many magnificent Hamilton heirlooms, paintings and
furniture. There were Rembrandts, Rubens, Van Dycks, and plenty
more, no doubt the cause of Creevey's acid comment about the new
Duchess, that "false devil who robbed her brother Archie of his
birthright",
⁶¹
brother Archie being Lord Archibald Hamilton. The
treasures she filched from the dukedom of Hamilton and passed to
the dukedom of Somerset were to be the cause of bitter family
upheavals amongst the Seymours in the next generation, and to
provoke a rift the effects of which are felt today. The Duchess was,
incidentally, incredibly mean. The
Farington Diary
records her
dinner table being decked with "nothing but a leg of mutton at the
top and a dish of potatoes at the bottom".

The Duke adopted the name St Maur in the belief that his family
originated from Normandy, and in denial of his real origin from
Seymour, yet paradoxically he called both his daughters Jane. Vanity
of this kind was an unusual aberration for him. He married a second
time after Charlotte's death, and he and his second wife are buried
simply in a grave at Kensal Green cemetery, part of the tombstone
broken with neglect.

His son the 12th Duke of Somerset (1804-1885) rose to a more
elevated and responsible position in public life than any duke since
the Lord Protector, married one of the most beautiful women of the
day, and had five happy children. From every point of view, however,
his life was to develop tragically.

In the first place, the beautiful Duchess was not a popular choice.
She was one of the three celebrated grand-daughters of the play­wright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and accordingly was always
known as the "Sheridan Duchess". That she was stunning there is
no question. Lord Dufferin saw her at the Eglinton tournament of
1839 and enthused about her "large deep blue or violet eyes, black
hair, black eyebrows and eyelashes, perfect features, and a complexion
of lilies and roses".
⁸²
Disraeli wrote ecstatically, "anything so splendid
I never gazed upon . . . clusters of the darkest hair, the most brilliant
complexion, a contour of face perfectly ideal".
⁶³

This was all very well, but she was not an aristocrat. No amount
of beauty could make up for low birth. From the beginning, then,
the rest of the family were fiercely opposed to her. Her father-in-law
the nth Duke (still alive at the time of the marriage), did all he
could to dissuade his impulsive son from embarking on such a union.
An eye for beauty was always a most powerful spur to any Seymour,
however, as his previous amours had shown. The principal seat of
the Seymours at this time was Stover Hall, in Devon, where the
Hamilton heirlooms were housed. That the Sheridan Duchess was
despised by other members of the family for her low birth is shown
by an extraordinary document signed by the 13th Duke, full of
vituperative contempt for her and her husband, which used to hang
for all to see at Maiden Bradley, and is now kept in a bottom drawer
there. In it, the Duke described her as a "low-born greedy beggar
woman", whose sole object was to get her hands on the property and
leave it away from the direct heirs. The Duchess of Hamilton com­mented acidly that she was not used to "novel splendours". The
Sheridan Duchess, who ate guinea-pigs and even produced a recipe
book to show dozens of ways in which guinea-pigs could be pre­pared,
⁶⁴
was happy with her husband and children, and viewed with
patronising tolerance the rest of the Seymours.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, the 12th Duke was a man of dis­tinction, remembered for having abolished flogging in the Navy.
"There cannot be a more estimable and agreeable man", wrote Lady
Holland,
⁶⁵
and she was right. He inherited his father's quest for
knowledge and evolved for himself the happy turn of phrase which
marks a literary man. He published nothing of note, but some
measure of the man may be inferred from a memorandum he wrote,
from the Admiralty, recommending improvements in recreational
facilities at Greenwich Hospital for Sailors. "This superb Palace", he
said, "with its long Galleries and spacious Colonnades, must, from the
Nature of the Institution, become intolerably wearisome to Men who
are not totally incapable of taking part in any Occupation or Amuse­ment." Leaving aside the nineteenth-century verbosity, this dry report
shows a man with sensibilities which, in his private life, were to prove
his undoing. "The Pensioners", he continued, "are necessarily shut
out from all the wholesome Interests and Enjoyments of Life; they
have no Employment; their material Wants are satisfied, and they are
relieved from every care of providing for their own Comfort and Sub­sistence; they pass their Day in a state of listless Idleness and Mental
Vacuity, until recalled at fixed Intervals to their Meals or their
Beds. It is not surprising that Old Sailors so circumstanced should
resort to the Alehouse or to worse Places . . . Greenwich Hospital
has a monastic character, wanting everything that tends to enliven or
endear a Home."
⁶⁶

Within a year of writing these sentences, the Duke's own home
life was shattered by the most unforeseeable disaster.

There were five children of the marriage - Hermione, Ulrica,
Guendolen, and two boys, Edward Adolphus Ferdinand known as
'Ferdy', who was the heir, and Lord Edward. Somerset had success­fully petitioned for a new title, to commemorate the alleged St Maur
origin of the family, and had been granted the title of Earl St Maur
in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. Ferdy was henceforth known
as Lord St Maur.

Father and sons were especially close. The Duke educated them
personally for two hours every morning in his study. The elder boy
revealed himself impatient of bookwork fairly soon; his was an adven­turous spirit, eager for a life of action, which in time demanded to be
set free, and though his wanderings caused his parents much anxious
worry, no attempt was made to smother his desires. Young Edward,
on the other hand, took to study with undisguised joy. "How cheer­fully eager he looked, with a pen stuck behind his ear and a heap
of books in his'arms, piled up and balanced under his chin, as he
turned into my father's study, dragging the door after him with his
foot", wrote Lady Guendolen.
⁶⁷
This picture relates to his thirteenth
year. The Duke lavished devotion upon him.

The brothers kept in touch when St Maur began his obsessive
travels about the world in search of military activity. "His love of
soldering is almost a madness", wrote Mary Smith to the Duchess.
⁶⁸
Martial ardour drove him to all parts of the globe, while his mother
sat at home wondering where on earth he was, and his father sat in
the Admiralty trying to conceal his embarrassment. He was arrested
in Naples for bodily harm against someone he had picked an argu­ment with, sued for damages, and settled out of court.
⁰⁹
He turned
up in the Far East, chasing a war, quite unperturbed by the perils
of a strange climate. "You will make yourself miserable about dangers
which in reality do not exist", he wrote in a vain attempt to
placate the Duchess.
⁷⁰
The Duke let it be known he was "vexed",
and wanted his son to return home. It fell upon the sixteen-year-old
Lord Edward to speak sense to his older brother. "Gadding about
the world", wrote Edward, "is nothing but a kind of intellectual
dissipation which must end in intellectual sea-sickness and head­ache."
⁷¹

St Maur, restless and headstrong, would not be restrained. He
wanted to cultivate experience, expose himself to foreign ways and
views, fight battles. Glory was not his aim; it was far more complex
than that. "Fame is the result of good fortune, not of real merit", he
told Edward, "and no man of sense or independence should make that
the object of his ambition."
⁷²
In time, having spent so much time in
the east, St Maur was seduced by the eastern ways of thought, and
began to write urging the contemplative life. Young Edward was
scornful. He told his brother he "wrapped himself in cerulean clouds
of aspirations, and thinks that 'wishing' is the highest action of the
mind".
⁷³
So the boys grew steadily apart, St Maur becoming a
friendless searcher after "the truth", shunning society, mixing with
difficulty, a trifle
farouche,
and frankly admitting that he avoided
English people abroad; Edward more gregarious, congenial, friendly,
showing great promise of a bright future on sensible lines. He had
wit, tenderness, and a highly gifted mind. At the age of eighteen, he
was attache at the British Embassy in Vienna, and at nineteen in
Madrid. He was in America during the Civil War, on which he
wrote an article for
Blackwood's Magazine.

St Maur, meanwhile, found his way to India and volunteered to
fight there in the relief of Lucknow. Headstrong as ever, he had to
be restrained from throwing his life away. He was mentioned in des­patches for "a daring gallantry at a most critical moment", corro­borated by eyewitnesses who said he was as brave as a lion. This did
little to comfort his parents, wondering where he would appear next.
Under the name of Richard Sarsfield, he then joined Garibaldi's
English volunteers in Italy, causing intense vexation to his father, still
First Lord of the Admiralty. The
Daily News
was the first to spill
the beans, with an eulogistic account of St Maur's courage and zeal.
St Maur hastily wrote assuring his parents he did not wish to cause
embarrassment. "My reason for not telling yourself or my mother of
my intentions in coming here has been misunderstood. To leave you
in complete ignorance of my movements was necessary in order to
render you entirely irresponsible for my conduct."
⁷⁴