The Dukes (53 page)

James Percy was no threat, as he had long since been dead. Other claimants were sprinkled about, though they were less vociferous, and did nothing to press their view. Dr Johnson knew a Dr Percy, who was said to "know" that he was the heir male of the Percys, and to have it proven by genealogists.
⁷

The Duchess, who was described by Lady Harriet Spencer as "very fat and has a great beard almost like a man",
⁸
had been told that she would not live beyond her sixtieth birthday. So firmly did she believe the prediction, that she spent the last few days before that birthday taking leave of friends and staff, and making necessary ar­rangements. On the day, she was confined to bed, and was clearly ill. At six o'clock in the evening, she asked what time it was. "I have then still two hours to live," she said, "for I was born at eight o'clock." She died two hours later, having lived sixty years to the minute.
⁹

The Duke survived her by ten years. Later dukes have not made any solid mark in history, though they have been very impor­tant in Northumberland. Their excursions into political life have been, on the whole, unsuccessful. They lack the patience and equilibrium necessary for a political career, and the desire to court popularity does not come easily to them. They are pious. The 6th Duke (1810- 1899) read prayers every evening at ten o'clock in the family chapel. "It is the only time I have seen evening prayers in any country house for the last fifteen years", wrote Augustus Hare.
¹⁰
The 8th Duke (1880- 1930) wrote some highly competent short stories, published posthum­ously, which have a religious theme. The first of them,
The Shadow on the Moor,
is a very disturbing ghost story, told with a tension in the narrative which many more famous writers would envy. Most of the dukes have shown a love of learning. The 4th Duke (1792—1865) went with Herschel to the Cape, collected Egyptian antiquities at Alnwick,
^[9]
paid for the publication of the monumental
Arabic Lexicon,
and was F.R.S., F.S.A., F.G.S., and F.A.S. In our own day Lord Eustace Percy (1887-11958), son of the 7th Duke, in 1909 came first in the Foreign Office competition, the most rigorous examination in the country. He had a brilliant brain, smothered by the anonymity of Whitehall. He wrote an excellent life of John Knox. Lord Richard Percy, the present Duke's brother, is a lecturer in zoology at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The Northumberlands have been noted for their generosity. The 2nd Duke (1742-1817) was particularly generous towards the actor Kemble. Covent Garden Theatre was burned to the ground in 1808, representing financial ruin for Kemble, who had recently invested every penny he had in that theatre. The Duke gave him £10,000, which Kemble refused to accept as a gift, but considered a loan. Two months later the foundation stone of the new theatre was laid, and the Duke sent to Kemble the bond which Kemble had written promising to repay the £10,000. With it was a letter: "It being a day of rejoicing, he concluded there would be a bonfire, and he therefore requested that the enclosed obligation might be thrown in, to heighten the flames."
¹¹
He was also friendly with Casanova, who visited him at Alnwick and apparently passed on to the Duke some of his conquests.

This Duke entertained twice a week at Alnwick, inviting tradesmen as well as aristocrats. When inflation reduced the value of money, he reduced his rents by twenty-five per cent. He was a compassionate and just man, who won the respect of the enemy when he fought at Boston and Concord in the American War of Independence; he had a secret sympathy with the American colonists, which matured as he examined their reasons. His life was scarred by an unfortunate marri­age to Lady Anne Stuart, daughter of the Earl of Bute, who was little short of a nymphomaniac. She bestowed her favours on all and sundry, except that is for her husband, who divorced her in 1779, after fifteen years of fruitless marriage, and an unsavoury hearing before the House of Lords. The maid, Sarah Reekes, testified before their lordships that a young Cambridge gentleman, William Bird, Esq., was a frequent visitor to her mistress, and that she often found them "undressed together", and "the bed much tumbled".
¹²
Percy married again, this time to the daughter of a Customs officer who was later ennobled, Frances Burrell, by whom he had several children, including his successor, the 3rd Duke of Northumberland (1785- 1847).

The 3rd Duke was the only one of the Northumberland line to make any sort of impact in public life, and that was not always for the best. He was enlightened, it was true; in 1807 he introduced a bill for the abolition of slavery in the colonies, which was counted out in the House and led to naught. He advised against the appli­cation of class distinction in the administration of criminal law, and always countered arguments of which he disapproved by the cool assessment of factual evidence. As the facts changed, so his opinion would change in accordance; he lacked the uncompromising nature of the true politician, being more of a political philosopher himself. He was, if a label were needed, a very moderate Tory, but he voted with the Whigs in the House of Commons, and with the Tories in the House of Lords. But how often can the most laudable of causes be jeopardised by unattractive advocates. The Duke of Northumberland was not an ally one would welcome. His philosophy was in the end quite shallow, the result of a half-educated man, and he possessed the weaknesses of his family - ostentation and an artless conversation. Lady Holland thought him a "weak, silly man ... a poor creature, vain, ostentatious and null".
¹³
When he was appointed Ambassador Extraordinary at the coronation of Charles X in Paris, he took with him twenty carriages, and added £8000 of diamonds to the family necklace. His appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was extremely unpopular. Greville wrote of him: "He is a very good sort of man, with a very narrow understanding, an eternal talker, and a prodigious bore ... he has no political opinions ... an absolute nullity, a bore beyond all bores, and, in spite of his desire to spend money and be affable, very unpopular. The Duchess complains of it and can't imagine why, for they do all they can to be liked, but in vain." Greville concludes with a gesture of dismissal which makes one feel for the poor Duke in his medieval castle: "no one cares for such a man of straw".
¹⁴

Of him it is recorded that he was pressed by his ambitious wife to petition for the Garter immediately upon his succession to the duke­dom in 1817. Lord Granville demurred, politely but firmly. The Duke said, "Then your Lordship will agree that I am the first Percy who was ever refused the Garter," to which Granville replied, "And moreover the first Smithson that ever presumed to think of it."
¹⁵
(He got his Garter, as had his two predecessors. In point of fact, every Duke of Northumberland with the exception of the 5th has been K.G.)

His duchess, Charlotte Florentia, was governess to Princess Victoria between 1835 and 1837, until she resigned owing to differences with the Princess's mother, Duchess of Kent, and her Svengali, Conroy. The Duchess of Northumberland took her responsibilities seriously, actually drawing up a programme of study for Victoria. An educated princess was not what Conroy wanted, so the Duchess had to leave.
¹⁸

The Northumberlands find a place in history for their involvement with a British heroine Grace Darling (1815-1842). Grace and her father lived in the Longstone lighthouse off Fame Islands. On 7th September 1838 a ship bound from Hull to Dundee was wrecked off the coast, and Grace and her father rowed out to rescue the sur­vivors, in the full knowledge that their own lives were thereby at risk. In the public acclaim which followed, the Duke of Northumberland assumed the role of guardian to young Grace, in a ponderous but well-meaning way. The family have been associated with the RoyalNational Lifeboat Institution ever since (the present Duke being Treasurer).

The 4th Duke, one of the kindest of men, is still known in the county as "Algernon the Benevolent", though he died as long ago as 1865, his tenants giving him a sumptuous funeral.

Thereafter, we lose sight of subsequent dukes, except in the pages of
Hansard.
They were always, of course, closely involved in local Northumberland affairs, and at Westminster they have held various political offices. But they have been austere; they do not appear to have come out in society very much. One of the 5th Duke's sons has the distinction of being the only member of a ducal family to have won the Victoria Cross.

When we come to the 8th Duke, Alan Ian Percy (1880-1930), we approach modern times, although he, apparently, did not. All contemporary accounts refer to him as an anachronism, entrenched in a feudal paternalism which expected deference due to a mini- monarch.
The Times
called him "a strong Tory, militant and uncom­promising",
¹⁷
hinting as far as it dare at a certain narrow-mindedness. On 1st March 1921 the Duke addressed a meeting at the House of Commons. "There is overwhelming evidence," he said, "that an international conspiracy exists which aims at the destruction of all existing institutions of Government and society, of all religion, of all moral laws, and all property throughout the United Kingdom, India, our Colonies, France and America." The conspiracy had decided to attack us through India and Ireland, and the I.R.A. was a Bolshevist organisation directed from Moscow. "One purpose in starting the rebellion first in Ireland is to compel us to maintain so large a gar­rison in that country that the forces of Great Britain may be insuf­ficient to deal with the Communist rising when it takes place."
¹⁸
The Duke of Northumberland made himself the spokesman of a intransi­gent, panicky pessimism which, in the end, did him a disservice, for it made his views appear to be grounded in emotion, whereas he had a crystal intelligence.

He also had considerable spirit. He once walked from Montreal to Ottawa in sub-zero temperatures, taking a day and a night in the journey.

His duchess was Helen Gordon-Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and a very distinguished lady. At the coronation in 1953 she looked more regal and secure than any member of the Royal Family, and in a way she was - her husband a duke, her brother a duke, and eventually both her sons dukes and both her daughters duchesses : it is an impressive record.

The next duke (1912-1940) was killed in action during World War II, leading a platoon of the Grenadier Guards at Tournai. He was succeeded by his brother, the 10th and present Duke of North­umberland,
k.g., t.d., f.r.s.,
born in 1914. The Duke is a taciturn man who talks to his boots and has the rare gift of being quite relaxed in any situation. He gives an impression of nonchalance which is perhaps deceptive. He is urbane, elegant and witty. He is some­thing of a revolutionary in the Northumberland line for having sent his daughters to a council school.

Three-quarters of Alnwick Castle is now a Teachers' Training College, and the Duke's family uses the remainder, contriving some­how to make a forbidding edifice into a comfortable home. Their quarters look out to the Auditor's Tower, where the 6th Earl of
Northumberland
locked up his auditor until he would balance the books properly. In the library there are half a dozen drawings
by
Molly Bishop of the Duke's three beautiful daughters (one of whom married Count Pierre de Cabarrus in 1974). There are three sons. The heir, Lord Percy, was born in 1953 with the Queen as his god­mother, only a month after her coronation.

The Duchess, a daughter of the late Duke of Buccleuch, is a woman of extraordinary energy. The Duke, too, is a far from idle man. He headed the Committee of Enquiry into the slaughter of horses, another committee into Foot and Mouth disease; he is Presi­dent of the Royal Agricultural Society and of the British Show Jumping Association, and he is, naturally, Lord Lieutenant of Northumberland.

There was a time when the Northumberlands had a magnificent town house in London. Northumberland House, pulled down in 1874, was the last of the noblemen's palaces on the Strand. The demolition of this sumptuous palace marked the end of the Strand as it had been known, a long line of beautiful houses each with a garden down to the Thames; it was then a road from London to West­minster. When commerce flooded into the area, Northumberland House was eventually swamped by little shops. According to tradi­tion, the Earl of Northampton (for whom the house was originally built) had been ridiculed for building at the village of Charing, so far from his town residence. With the passage of time, the house found itself in the centre of the hubbub of modern London, and had to make way for Northumberland Avenue. It was the oldest residen­tial house in London, begun by a Howard, continued by a Percy, and completed by a Seymour, the home of the Northumberlands for two and a half centuries, but the Metropolitan Board of Works said that it must go. Compensation of £497,000 was paid to the then Duke for the compulsory purchase. The Duke removed the Percy lion which sat on the top of the house to his Middlesex property, Syon House, and he packaged many of the cornices and fireplaces which he wished to preserve. Some of them are still in their packaging.

As for Syon House, that was opened to the public in 1950 and the Duke lives there whenever he has to be in London. What of the rest of the Percy land? The Stanwick estate in Yorkshire was sold in 1920, and two years later there followed the Albury Park estate in Surrey (keeping, however, the mansion itself). The centre of the landholdings is still Alnwick.

It is ironic that the most famous member of the Northumberland family is remembered in America rather than in England. James Smithson (1765-1829) was the illegitimate son of the 1st Duke of Northumberland by Elizabeth Hungerford Keate. He was born in France (it was customary for pregnant mistresses to be sent to the con­tinent so that they might resume a normal shape discreetly; the Duke of Devonshire did the same each time Lady Elizabeth Foster was ex­pecting his offspring), and was known for a time as Louis Macie, then as James Lewis. He studied at Pembroke College, Oxford, where his brilliant scientific mind made him the leading chemist and miner­alogist of his year. It was as mineralogist that he made his name, and a carbonite of zinc is named after him -
Smithsonite.
He travelled widely in the course of his work, and died at Genoa at the age of sixty-four. Smithson held extremely radical views, as far to the left as his father's descendants would be to the right. He thought that mon­archy was "a contemptible encumbrance". His republican sympathies account for his having left almost his entire wealth to the United States, in those days the bright hope of the left-wing reformers. He was a very rich man, with money derived from his mother, not his father, and the bequest he made was quite specific: "to the United States of America, to be found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men". Two years later, £104,000 was sent from London to the United States, after negotiations with a per­sonal envoy of the President, and the Institution was established in 1846, the government of the U.S. agreeing to pay six per cent on the capital in perpetuity. The first Secretary of the Institute interpreted its functions as follows: "To assist men of science in making original researches, to publish them in a series of volumes, and to give a copy of them to every first-class library on the face of the earth." In addi­tion, it has conducted scientific expeditions to all parts of the world. It is a source of information to private citizens, and has a museum housed in one of the most beautiful buildings in America.