The Dukes (69 page)
His achievement was to establish military bases for the protection of trade.
The 1st Duke of Newcastle of the present creation, Thomas Pelham-Holles (1693-1768), was in an even more exalted position, for he was Prime Minister for the best pan of seven years from 1754 to 1762. (His younger and more famous brother, Henry Pelham, preceded him as Prime Minister.) The country has probably never had, before or since, a more universally ridiculed leader than Newcastle. He was a total buffoon. Hopelessly disorganised, and deeply ignorant, he seriously thought Hanover was north of England. He fussed and bothered and bustled and rushed and appeared all the time ever so important and busy, but his absurd posturings brought him laughter, not prestige. Hervey makes all kinds of disparaging remarks about him. The Duke is "light-headed", "a fidget, a fright and a bustle", he talks without thinking, and he has "limb-fever".
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"Wealth, titles and power and honours can no more give sense to the Duke of Newcastle, than paint, patches and brocade can give beauty to the Duchess of Rutland."
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Walpole said that it made him smile to watch Newcastle "frisking while his grave is digging".
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Nobody took him seriously. He was quite devoid of tact, insulting people through innocent foolishness and being deeply hurt and worried if ever he found out that he had done so (people made sure he did), for he wanted more than anything to get on well with everyone, and for everyone to think him a splendid fellow. Naturally, they did not; they thought him obsequious and silly. Newcastle concluded that there was a conspiracy against him, which made him anxious, fretful, and finally jealous. "He personalised any political or family disagreement as a lack of love for him or lack of understanding of his predicament of the moment."
80
His vanity was injured; he had tried so hard to please, and his failure he ascribed to the faithlessness of those around him. Thereupon, he became distrustful and suspicious to the point of paranoia. He harboured grudges. He would burst into tears on the smallest pretext. "His nature and mind were warped, twisted and stunted, and his life must have been an agony, though perhaps he himself did not clearly realise how much he suffered. He was haunted by fears; every small incident was the portent of terrible things to come; every molehill a volcano. With an abundant substratum of intelligence and common sense, he looked a fool, and with an inexhaustible fund of warm human kindness and sincere goodwill, he acquired a reputation for dishonesty. ... If he was vain, this was merely a craving for some compensation for the insults and humiliations, real and imaginary, which he daily suffered and which cut him to the heart.""
Of this humiliation, there is ample evidence in his letters. In one outburst to the Bishop of Salisbury he is hurt "to see me deserted, and abandoned by almost everybody, by my own Family particularly, and my Enemies, by that alone, encouraged and enabled to treat me with the greatest Marks of Indignity and Contempt; when all I expect is Common Decency, and Common Respect".
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The best that can be said for the Duke of Newcastle is that his faults were forgivable, and his intentions good. But he was not a statesman. Among dukes, he was the chemical opposite of that solid imperturbable 8th Duke of Devonshire, who refused three times the office of Prime Minister, yet wielded more influence by sitting still than did all the ceaseless scurrying of Newcastle, "at least as much frightened of doing right as of doing wrong".
Newcastle had a habit of throwing his arms about people's necks and smothering them with kisses. He turned up on the Duke of Grafton's sickbed and almost caused him a relapse with his energetic demonstrations of affection.
The 2nd Duke (1720-1794), who was known as Lord Lincoln in his youth, had a very high opinion of his sexual powers, about which he boasted far and wide. He was famous for his bed-hopping. He was encouraged, it is true, by that licentious age to take advantage of his good looks; even the King acknowledged that in his view Lincoln was "the handsomest man in England".
ss
The Earl was twenty-one years old when this remark relates, and already a lady-killer. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams addressed him a wickedly explicit Ode:
"O Lincoln, joy of womankind,
To you this humble ode's design'd;
Let inspire my song:
Gods! with what pow'rs you are endu'd!
Tiberius was not half so lewd,
Nor Hercules so strong."
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In 1743 he was appointed Lord of the Bedchamber, and Walpole played a joke on him. At a masquerade ball, he dressed as a Persian, and thus disguised approached Lord Lincoln, producing from his bosom a letter wrapped in Persian silk, saying it was from Kouli Kan. It was addressed to "Henry Clinton Earl of Lincoln, highly favoured among women". Here is a piece of it:
"We have heard prodigious things of thee: they say, thy vigour is nine times beyond that of our prophet; and that thou art more amorous than Solomon the son of David. Yet they tell us, that thou art not above the ordinary stature of the sons of men: are these things so?
. . . Adieu, happy young man! May thy days be as long as thy manhood, and may thy manhood continue more piercing than Zufager, that sword of Hali which had two points, etc."
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Lady W. Montagu's messenger-boy, who was barely sixteen years old, said that he was not such a child that he did not know what went on whenever Lord Lincoln paid a call. Her ladyship always instructed the staff to admit no one else, and then called for pen and ink, declaring that she and Lord Lincoln were engaged in writing history.
Lincoln subordinated everything to his amorous pursuits. He had no time for his uncle, the 1st Duke, who foolishly adored him, and in politics he was "as much of a nonentity as a duke can in England be ...a nullity".
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His descendant, the 6th Duke of Newcastle (1834-1879), married on an impulse of the heart. He saw a beautiful girl walking down the street in Nice, followed her for a while, and determined to find out who she was. This was Henrietta Adela Hope, illegitimate daughter of Henry Hope, and she was in time Duchess of Newcastle. After her husband's death she became a Roman Catholic, and went to live in the slums of Whitechapel with two other ladies, devoting herself to social work. Like the "flying Duchess" of Bedford, who liked to show her guests the most "interesting" cases in her cottage hospital at Woburn, the Duchess of Newcastle loved the worst cases of social degradation in the East End. She is buried at St Patrick's Leytonstone.
The 8th Duke (1866-1941) married twice. His first wife was an actress, or more accurately a song-and-dance girl, called Mary Augusta Yohe, an American girl of Dutch extraction. They married at Hampstead Register Office in 1894. The marriage was a disaster, ending in divorce in 1902. The Duke chose for his second wife the daughter of an Australian banker. She was Olive Murial Thompson, and when she died in 1912 he retreated from public view as completely as he could. He had also lost a leg in a shooting accident by this time.
The son of the 8th Duke and Olive Muriel Thompson is the 9th and present Duke of Newcastle, born in 1907. He flew with the R.A.F. in World War II, and has been a squadron leader. He has been married three times. His first wife was Mrs Jean Banks Gimbernat, the adopted daughter of Mr Banks of New York. They were divorced in 1940. The Duke's second wife was Lady Mary Montagu-Stuart- Wortley, daughter of the Earl of Wharncliffe, in 1946. They had two daughters, then separated. Before he could marry his third wife, Sally Ann Wemyss, the Duke was cited in her divorce case amid a torrent of unaccustomed publicity. The episode was called by the Duchess "overpoweringly vulgar".
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Two years later, the Duke was divorced, and he married the present Duchess in Jamaica in 1959. By that time he had broken every tangible link with England. - The Duke's second daughter, Lady Kathleen Pelham-Clinton- Hope, in 1970 provided the newspapers with the most picturesque instance of impulsive affection in the history of her family. She met a London Transport Underground train guard at a party one evening, and married him the next day. His name was Edward Reynolds. Three days later they were separated. Lady Kathleen told the newspapers that it had all been a joke, "a gas" to use her own expression.
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Curiously, Lady Kathleen's sudden elopement in 1970 is almost exactly paralleled by that of her great-great-aunt Lady Susan Clinton in 1858. Lady Susan did not choose a railway guard, but her impulses were just as raw.
She was the only daughter of the 5th Duke of Newcastle (the Crimean one), and she fell in love with Lord Adolphus Vane, son of the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry. It was a
coup de foudre.
Unfortunately, the Duke withheld his consent. Three times she implored him, and three times he made her refuse Lord Adolphus. The reasons were not rank or money this time: the Londonderrys were wealthy enough. The real cause was sinister: Lord Adolphus was on the brink of madness, although none of the participants in the drama which ensued can bring themselves to say so.
The Duke wrote to Lady Londonderry (with a style fitting for one who had been the only duke ever to be President of the Oxford Union, in 1831),
". . . though I hope you will feel that I may rightly decline to enter into particulars or assign any reason, I must distinctly and positively refuse my consent to the marriage. Moreover I can hold out no hope of any change of my resolution in this respect. ... I should add that I cannot allow any meeting in future, and therefore my daughter will leave town at once. Of course Lord Adolphus will feel that as a Gentleman he must not think of correspondence.
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Lady Londonderry wrote back appealing to the Duke's "kind heart", telling of her son "whose unhappiness I cannot witness without pain and anxiety", of his "intense misery", and of Lady Susan's sincere attachment to him, but failing to mention that he was off his head. The Duke was unmoved. Frustrated by inaction, the young lovers met clandestinely, and Newcastle was roused to write another starchy letter to her ladyship, telling darkly that "his behaviour afterwards was such as, in writing to you, I should not trust myself to characterise". More than this, "he subjected my daughter to an indignity which few girls ever had to submit to from a man aspiring to the position of husband".
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Whatever could he have done?
Lady Susan was compelled to write a final letter of refusal to Adolphus, hinting that she would like to say more were she at liberty to speak her own mind. A year later, she did speak her own mind. On the day she came of age, 23rd April 1860, she walked out of her father's house, and met Lord Adolphus in Bryanston Square. They were married that day at St Mary's Church.
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She was given away by her brother Lord Lincoln (later 6th Duke). Her father was broken-hearted, and would have nothing more to do with her. Lady Londonderry tactfully stayed away from the church, but gave them a wedding breakfast at Londonderry House afterwards. The honeymoon took place in Brighton, where happiness lasted barely a week. Lord Adolphus had one of his attacks, went berserk, and frightened his wife out of her wits. A year later he was arrested for causing a disturbance in Coventry Street, the newspapers were full of his "serious illness", and doctors wrote alarming letters to his brother Lord Vane. Susan, Lady Adolphus as she now was, grew desperate with fear, leading a miserable life for four years during which she lived on opium. Adolphus died of his last attack in 1864. She lived on till 1875.
One of the 5th Duke's sons, Lord Arthur Clinton, made himself noticed by homosexual attachments. The Duke was decidedly unlucky.
He had also to live with the reputation of his extraordinary father the 4th Duke of Newcastle (1785-1851), whose rigid conservatism marked him out as a personality lacking the precious ingredient of equilibrium. His social attitudes and his political opinions were so far beyond the extremities of right-wing Toryism that he fell out with all and sundry. The
Illustrated London News
commented upon his "unbending consistency and determined hostility to the progress of liberal opinions".
43
He refused to vote against the Reform Bill, of which he disapproved; he said that he did not require evidence, that he would have no such Bill, and that he would not meddle with the discussion at all except to oppose it point-blank.
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On another occasion he was so obdurate against Lord John Russell about the appointment of magistrates in his own county, where he deemed he had sole right to decisions of that nature, that Russell was bound to get the Queen to dismiss him from his post as Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire. Russell wrote bluntly : "Her Majesty has no further occasion for your services", which bewildered the innocent Newcastle so much that he took the letter to the Duke of Wellington. "What shall I do?" he asked. "Do?" said Wellington. "Do nothing."
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The most celebrated row he unwittingly provoked was occasioned by his ejecting tenants from his property at Newark, without due regard for their welfare, it was thought. He was attacked by the
Morning Chronicle,
leaving him almost speechless with incomprehension. He summoned his reason to make the historic remark, "Is it not lawful for me to do what I please with my own?" upon which a storm broke about his ears. The crowds attacked him in the street, besieged his residences; one of his homes, Nottingham Castle, was burnt to the ground by a furious mob, at which the Duke had to reinforce his other properties as if in wartime. The Attorney General was on record as saying that the Duke's remark was "scandalous and wicked", whereupon the still ingenuous Duke, unaware that he had said or done anything wrong, took the matter to the House of Lords, and sought their lordships' support. He claimed that he had been abused and baited by the "vulgar multitude" and that the Attorney General had sided with his enemies. The House of Lords did not give him satisfaction. In the first place, they could not, since his personal popularity was not a matter for their consideration. Secondly, they disapproved of his attitude as much as the rest of the country. Thirdly, he added to his troubles by letting slip another opinion which confirmed his isolation. He said that he hoped no Englishman would consent to admit anything so revolting, so debasing to the character of the nation, as vote by ballot.
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The Lord Chancellor elected to proceed with serious business, and the embattled Duke retired in high dudgeon to nurse his resentments.
