The Dukes (76 page)

Manchester was appointed Lord Lieutenant for the county of Huntingdonshire and, intriguingly, High Steward of Godmanchester. It must surely be from this time that the confusion as to the origin of the title dates. He died from a violent three-day fever after catching a chill watching cricket at Brighton.

So did his son, the 5th Duke (1771-1843), who continued his father's enlightened policies, particularly as Governor of Jamaica for nearly twenty years (1808-1827). In the face of vigorous opposition from the sugar and coffee planters, the Duke of Manchester intro­duced a number of reforms for the benefit of black slaves. To propose that whips should not be carried in the streets, and that women should be exempt from flogging may not now seem aggressively socialist, but it was a brave man who would take the side of the slaves even in a measured degree at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Another of the Duke's attitudes, of which there is also thankfully no vestige today, was that extraordinary indifference to the affairs of his own family, that impenetrable starchiness of the paterfamilias which we so often find in the aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A glimpse of it is afforded in 1822, when the Duke's son and heir, Lord Mandeville, announced his engagement. A lady approached the Duke and complimented him, making polite phrases about young Mandeville's excellent character, talents, man­ners, etc., until the Duke interrupted her to say that he knew little or nothing of the young man.
³²
Perhaps his accident two years before had had some effect; he had fallen out of his carriage and fractured his skull. Or perhaps he simply was not interested in the boy, who reminded him of his notorious wife and their unhappy marriage. She had been a daughter of Jane, Duchess of Gordon, and had become the archetype of the Duchess who really
did
elope with her footman, some time before 1812. As for the Duke, he was widely regarded as a splendid-looking man. One woman went so far as to describe him as "the most beautiful statue-like person that ever was seen in flesh and blood".
⁸³

With the coming of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Man­chester enter a period when they are leaders of the "fast set", taking their cue from the Prince of Wales, and viewed askance by the better-behaved ducal families. The Abercorns, their neighbours in London, darkly instructed their children that the Manchester's were "worldly".
³⁴
None of this volatility within the social scale was achieved by the dukes; the 7th Duke of Manchester (1823-1890) was "a well-intentioned bore", and his laboursome book,
Court and Society,
corroborates the judgement. But his wife was a different matter. It was she who brought zest and sparkle to the Manchester set and made it "fast", and who, with her driving ambition, lifted her dull husband from the shadows. She was Louise von Alten, a German countess, gloriously beautiful, and eventually to be known as the "Double Duchess". We have already met her as the Duchess of Devonshire. She married the Duke of Devonshire forty years after she married the Duke of Manchester, but even before that she exerted a powerful influence over her retiring proteg6, who was far more intel­ligent than her husband and far more worthy of her ambitions. Louise's spell has not yet quite evaporated in the last quarter of the twentieth century, while the two husbands, whom she made shine, have grown dim with time.

The death of Louise in 1911 really did mark the end of an era; for once the cliche is appropriate. Three years later the Great War smashed the aristocratic way of life with indiscriminate vengeance, and the like of Louise von Alten was not to be seen again. On a domestic scale, her death also marked a profound change in the Man­chester family (although it is true to say the Devonshires have gone on much as before). In the last hundred years, the Dukes of Man­chester have gradually divorced themselves from English life, have married colossally wealthy foreign heiresses and taken their money abroad. Kimbolton Castle, which gave them one of their titles, is now a grammar school. The 9th Duke of Manchester very neatly made the last flamboyant gesture of the old style at about the same date that Louise died; he challenged Crown Prince Willie of Germany to a duel, because the man had behaved like a cad.
³⁵
Willie did not accept, but it must be one of the last such challenges seriously made in our history. Characteristically, Manchester was most concerned that the Crown Prince should not refuse simply because his rank as Duke was not sufficiently elevated for the German to accept with honour. Only ten or twenty years later, everyone would have laughed the man to scorn.

The 8th Duke (1853-1892) married Consuelo Iznaga del Valle, of Ravenswood, U.S.A., and of Cuba. She had wit and vivacity and was very popular. Besides a son and heir, she produced twin daugh­ters, Alice and Mary, who as infants were presented to Queen Victoria, on whom they immediately pounced, without ceremony, almost choking her with embraces, and shouting "Nice Queen! Nice Queen!" They must have been charming, for the Queen was, this time, amused. Later at lunch, the little girls were appalled to see Her Majesty take up a chicken bone and pick it with her fingers. Pointing at her, they shouted in unison, "Piggy wiggy!!"
³⁶
Alas, the girls had a much chastened future. They were both ill in their youth, and died of consumption, one aged sixteen, the other at twenty-one.

The 9th Duke (1877-1947) married the daughter of a railway director in Cincinnati, Ohio, Helena Zimmerman, and their son was the Kenyan duke, Alexander Drogo Montagu,
o.b.e.

In 1967 the modern descent of those accomplished lawyer Montagus, who we are told love the constitution of their country and cherished the way in which its history was preserved in legal
documents, removed the Manchester Papers from the Public Record
documents, removed the Manchester Papers from the Public Record Office, where they had been deposited for a century. The Keepers of the Office protested, pointing out that the collection was a valuable source for scholars and should reside in the P.R.O. if the Duke of Manchester was not prepared to house them himself. He offered them for sale to the Office, at a price of £1200 but there were no funds to meet such a demand. He then offered them to the British Museum, and they too could not afford to buy them. So the 10th Duke sold them at Sotheby's, and the precious collection was dispersed to all winds. Among the papers was found an unknown manuscript poem in the hand of John Donne.

references

1.
    
The Duke of Manchester,
My Candid Recollections,
p.30.

2.
    
Submission to 1960 Monckton Commission, quoted in
The Times,

13 th September 1968.

3.
    
Sunday Mirror,
17th October 1965.

4.
    
The Guardian,
4th October 1965.

5.
    
The Scotsman,
10th November 1964.

6.
   
The Observer,
12th September 1968.

7.
   
Daily Telegraph,
13th September ig68.

8.
    
The Guardian,
4th October 1965.

9„ Duke of Montrose,
My Ditty Box,
p.
11.
1 o. S. R. Gardiner, quoted in
Complete Peerage.

11.
      
C. V. Wedgwood,
Montrose.,
p. 27.

12.
    
John Buchan,
Montrose,
Appendix.

13.
     
ibid.,
pp. 168-9.

14.
    
Clarendon,
History of the Rebellion,
Chapter XV.

15.
     
Duke of Montrose,
My Ditty Box,
p.
13.

16.
    
British Museum, Egerton MSS, 19399, f. 62, quoted in
Complete

17.
     
Peerage.

18.
    
CaLS.P.Dom., 1650,
p. 61.

19.
    
Hist. MSS. Comm.,
6th Report, p. 609.

20.
   
Complete Peerage.

21.
     
Wraxall,
Posthumous Memoirs,
Vol. I, p. 59.

22.
    
Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Queen Victoria,
Vol. I, p. 180.

23.
    
Greville, IV,
81.

24.
   
D.N.B.

25.
    
Clarendon,
History of the Rebellion,
Chapter XXIV.

26.
    
ibid.,
Introduction.

27.
    
Characters of the Seventeenth Century,
ed. David Nichol Smith,

p. 162.

28.
    
Complete Peerage,
Vol. IV, Appendix D.

29.
   
Bernard Falk,
The Way of the Montagues,
p. 40.

30.
    
Lord Hervey and His Friends,
p. 121.

31.
     
Falk,
op. cit.,
p.
282.

32.
    
Duke of Manchester,
My Candid Recollections,
p.
27.

33.
    
Creevey,
Life and Times,
p.
171.

34.
    
Complete Peerage.

35.
    
Lord Ernest Hamilton,
The Halycon Era,
p. 74.

36.
    
Duke of Manchester,
My Candid Recollections,
p.
233.

37.
    
ibid.,
p. 56

Duke of Bridgwater; Duchess of Albemarle; Duchess of Bolton; Duchess of Kingston; Duchess of Cleveland; Duke of Berwick ; Duke of Leeds

In the history of the realm,
162
separate ducal titles have been created (excluding the royal dukedoms), and only twenty-six remain today. It would be a pity to ignore some of the more interesting or colourful characters of the past, whose lines are now extinct. Some, like the Duke of Buckingham (of the Villiers family), would deserve, and have been accorded, a book to themselves; others, like the Duke of Ancaster, belong in oblivion. I would like, at this point, to select, in a totally arbitrary and personal way, a
few
of the personalities who were once the centre of attention but who now languish in neglect.

A name which has occurred more than once in these pages is the Duke of Bridgwater. He turns up in the Sutherland story, for they inherited his property and the present Duke of Sutherland bears his surname - Egerton; he is mentioned in the Hamilton and the Argyll accounts, for he was a suitor of the widowed Duchess of Hamilton (Elizabeth Gunning), who later accepted the Duke of Argyll; and some of his property was recently sold by the Duke of Westminster.

There were only three dukes of Bridgwater, a father and two sons. It is the 3rd Duke, Francis Egerton (1736-1803), who made the title famous by building the Bridgwater canals and so anticipating by over half a century the great revolution in transport brought about by the railways. So celebrated was this achievement that it is often supposed his title was chosen to represent "bridge over the water". The title in fact predated the canal system by many years, and is owed instead to a small town in County Somerset, which means "the burg of Walter" and should therefore always be spelt without the central "e".

Francis Egerton was the second son of the
ist
Duke of Bridgwater (Scroop Egerton) and Lady Rachel Russell,
^[16]
daughter of the Duke of Bedford. As a child he was "not only sickly, but apparently of such feeble intellect that his exclusion from succession to the dukedom was actually contemplated". However, his elder brother died, which brought him the dukedom at the age of twelve. At seventeen he was still a disaster, ignorant and unruly. While still a very young man, he proposed to Elizabeth Gunning and was at first accepted. But he insisted that after the marriage she should have nothing further to do with her sister Lady Coventry, of whom he did not approve. She not surprisingly refused to comply with this condition, so he abruptly broke off the engagement, and retired in disgust to his country seat in Lancashire, at the age of twenty-three, resolved to have nothing more to do with "society".

Within weeks of his self-inflicted exile, he turned his attention to his canal scheme, which presumably he had been nurturing. He obtained authority by Act of Parliament to build a canal from Worsley to Salford, but James Brindley the contractor, who had undertaken similar but less ambitious work for Lord Stafford, the Duke's brother-in-law, peysuaded him to build the canal as far as Manchester, with an aqueduct over the Irwell. We now take such matters so much for granted that it is difficult to imagine how absurdly futuristic it appeared to contemporaries, who ridiculed the whole idea. Fortunately Bridgwater was not one to be deflected by mockery, so he adopted the scheme with almost visible defiance. A second Act of Parliament was obtained in 1760, and so was built the first canal in England to be entirely independent of a natural stream throughout its course. The aqueduct attracted sightseers, and, more practically, the price of coal in Manchester was reduced by half as a result of cheap transport. The Duke of Bridgwater was called the founder of British inland navigation.

That is not the end of the story, however. The Duke and Brindley then proposed a canal from Manchester to Liverpool. They met with fierce opposition. It was a foolish undertaking, the idea of a madman, it would never be realised. Unperturbed, the Duke proceeded with his plan, gained the permission of Parliament, and built the canal, twenty-eight miles long, three times as long as the earlier one. It was an astonishing engineering feat, achieved at great personal cost to the Duke, who had not only to pay for the construction, but to compen­sate landowners whose land had been acquired by compulsory purchase. He reduced his own spending to that of a modest worker, with enough to live and eat (he did
not bother much with clothing), and Brindley accepted a fee of just one guinea a week. Nearly a quarter of a million pounds was spent on the construction, but ulti­mately the canals were so successful they yielded the Duke an income of £80,000 a year. The Bridgwater canal still serves the country; it was bought by the Manchester Ship Canal Co. in 1890 for £1,710,000.

Personally, the Duke was rather odd. He would talk about nothing but canals, and he never wrote a letter unless he absolutely had to. He paid no heed to what he was wearing, was utterly careless of his appearance, and despised those who were correspondingly careful. He had few friends. After the Gunning episode, he became a resolute misogynist, not even allowing a woman servant to wait on him. He accumulated a priceless collection of paintings, which passed to the Duke of Sutherland, his brother-in-law, and has since been dispersed. So much contempt did he have for any embellishment, for anything pretty and ornamental as opposed to merely useful, that one day, finding some flowers had been planted in his garden, lie whipped off their heads with his stick and ordered them to be rooted up.
¹

The dukedom was extinct with his death in 1803 , but the earl­dom passed to a nephew, who was even more eccentric than his uncle.

The 8th and last Earl of Bridgwater (1756-1829), also named Francis Egerton, lived alone in a house on the rue St Honore in Paris, which he referred to as the Hotel Egerton. He was unmarried, but surrounded by friends, none of whom, however, did he select from the human species. The house was filled to overflowing with cats and dogs, which he picked up on the streets and invited to share his home. There were at least fifteen dogs, many of which were frequently observed driving through the streets of Paris in a carriage with four horses and attended by footmen. They shared his meals with him, at his dining-table, dressed up as people, with napkins round their necks, and each with a liveried footman standing behind. Bridgwater's bootmaker had a constant order to supply boots for the dogs, as well as for himself - he never wore the same pair twice in a year, there were never less than 365 pairs of boots ready for him. If any one of the dogs misbehaved himself at dinner, tie was the next day banished to the servants' quarters, where he ate his meal dressed in livery until he repented. The garden was stocked with rabbits, and with pigeons and partridges whose wings were clipped to allow his lordship the sport of killing a few for his dinner. In his will, a strange document, he made a number of legacies to his servants with the instruction that such legacies were to be regarded as void if he should be "assassinated or poisoned".
²
The dogs inherited nothing.

When his dentist, Monsieur Chemans, happened to reveal that his little son had been stricken with scarlet fever, Bridgwater rushed out of the room, stripped naked, and threw his clothes on the fire to escape contamination. The servants were commanded to do the same.

Bridgwater spent his time writing dozens of eccentric books, now unavailable for the most part except in the British Museum. They show a learned man whose intelligence degenerated into whimsy. His name is remembered for one bequest in the will, an endowment of £8000 to be given to those authors who would write the most satisfactory essays on "the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in His Creation". These subsequently were known as the "Bridgwater Treatises".

Even more crazy than Bridgwater was the Mad Duchess of Albemarle (1654-1734), born Elizabeth Cavendish, a daughter of the Duke of Newcastle in the Cavendish line, and thereby descended from Bess of Hardwick and distantly related to both the Devonshires and the Portlands. She married first Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle on 30th December 1669, when she was fifteen years old, and her bridgegroom sixteen. At first her tantrums gave no serious cause for alarm, but her mind showed signs of being unhinged before she was thirty. She rarely seemed to know what she was saying or doing, with the result that an excursion with her into society was an embarrassment. There are some letters written by her at this young age, now among the Buccleuch papers, which make no sense whatever unless one considers them the ravings of a maniac. Poor Albemarle was driven to drink by the strain of it all, and died at the age of thirty-five in 1688, when his wife had been mad for about six years. Demented though she was, the Duchess was still a prize to be sought. There was no heir to the Albemarle fortune, a fact not lost on noble suitors who lined up to make her happy, affecting to turn a blind eye to her goings-on. She was now living in seclusion, looked after by two ageing doctors and a pair of conniving sisters, Mary and Sarah Wright. She had moreover descended to such depths of insanity that she made it known she would not deign to consider any second husband unless he was a crowned head. Amazingly enough, there was a man whose greed was so much greater than his pride as to allow him to woo under these conditions. Ralph Montagu, a relation of the Manchester family, presented himself to the mad Duchess as the Emperor of China, was accepted by her to gratify the dying wish of her father Newcastle, and was married to her in a ceremony befitting her new rank. Everyone involved took part in the deception, and to her dying day she thought she was Empress of China and was served on the knee accordingly.

No sooner was Ralph established in the Empress's Palace (re­named Montagu House, which is now the British Museum), than he petitioned the King, William III, to grant him a dukedom in a truly grovelling letter. In due time, he was created Duke of Montagu, which incidentally, though she did not know it, made Elizabeth Cavendish a double duchess, the first of three women so distinguished in our peerage history (the other two being Elizabeth Gunning - Hamilton and Argyll, and Louise von Alten - Manchester and Devonshire).

The new marriage produced nothing but trouble for the Duke of Montagu. A less determined man might well have collapsed under the weight of endless lawsuits concerning the Albemarle property, but he simply bribed his witnesses to perjure themselves in order that he might hang on to the £7000 a year which was his due from the Duchess. Since no one had seen her for years, it was bruited that she had died and that Montagu was concealing her death from the world so that his ill-gotten gains might continue. He was eventually obliged by special Act of Parliament to produce her in public. Meanwhile, she was declared a lunatic, unable to manage her affairs, and removed to a house where she could be looked after more carefully. "Only by dint of the most cunning artifices was she induced to transfer the seat of her imperial throne from Bloomsbury to Clerkenwell."
³

Not before having the last laugh, however. The Duke of Montagu, for all his cunning, was not clever enough to outlive her. He died in 1709, prompting a reflection which must have been shared by many. "For my part I'm apt to think he could have foreseen, or rather believed at what a distance this present world and he would soon have been, he for the honour sake of his family would discreetly have knock'd her Ladyship on the head in good time."
⁴

She lived to the age of eighty, though she was popularly believed to be ninety-six when she died.

To go back one generation in the Albemarle line, one finds that the 1st Duke, General George Monck, also made a curious marriage. While he was a prisoner in the Tower of London in 1646, he made the acquaintance of a common slattern called Anne Clarges, who was occasionally employed at the prison as visiting sempstress. It was in such a capacity, no doubt, that she came into contact with the Duke, and before long he made her his mistress as well. The daughter of a farrier in the Strand, sister of an apothecary, and wife of a milliner, Anne was engaged in the selling of perfumes and wash-balls. By all accounts, her sweet-smelling employment did little to alleviate the unwholesomeness of her person. She was popularly known as "Dirty Bess" and Pepys called her, in a relatively kind moment, a "plain, homely dowdy" or, less tolerantly, "the veryest slut and drudge and the foulest worde that can be spoken of a woman almost".

After his release from prison, the Duke and Anne lived together as man and wife for about seven years, eventually marrying on 23rd January 1653, presumably because she was pregnant. She gave birth to Christopher Monck, the 2nd Duke of Albemarle, in an attic over a tailor's shop seven months later.

To say that she did not fit easily into the aristocratic life would be an understatement. Everyone was appalled. Clarendon wrote that the Duke was "cursed, after long familiarity, to marry a woman of the lowest extraction, the least wit, and less beauty". Pepys nick­named her "the Monkey Duchess", and agreed that beauty was not among her attributes; she was "a damned ill-looked woman". After dining with the couple, he went home to write of "dirty dishes, and a nasty wife at table, and bad meat".
⁶
She was also commonly sus­pected of avarice and extortion. In short, Anne Clarges had positively nothing to recommend her; her vulgar habits and her ignorance brought derision upon the Duke.