The Dukes (14 page)

With his gruff manner, heavy-lidded eyes, and bluntness which was
just short of dismissive, he was one of the rare surviving noblemen
who managed to caricature themselves. At the investititure of the
Prince of Wales in 1970 the Duke had to deal with the Secretary of
State for Wales, George Thomas, son of a Rhondda miner. Thomas
offered him a cup of tea. "Never touch the stuff," replied Norfolk.
The Welshman then went to the cupboard to get some alcoholic
drinks. "Wrong time of day," said the Duke, and that was the end of
that. The two men later became friendly enough. The Duke said, "I
am going to call you George, and you will call me Bernard," and
Thomas says he felt it was an order.

He treated everyone with the same brisk laconic precision. Stories
of his behaviour at the coronation are legion. "If the bishops don't
learn to walk in step we shall be here all night" he is reported to have
said; and to the Archbishop of Canterbury, "No, no, Archbishop, that
won't do at all. Go back there and we'll do it all again. "He was not at all aware that his no-nonsense approach, shorn of
all unnecessary adornment, could be extremely funny. At dinner he
was heard to turn to a lady guest on his right and say, "Now; I have
only two topics of conversation - cricket and drains. Choose." He
claimed that he did not know when he was being amusing, and what's
more, he did not care.

The Howards have always been men of few words. On one occasion
Lord Carlisle and his brother travelled abroad together, and slept in
the same room at an inn in Germany. There was a third bed in
the room with the curtains drawn round it. Two days later, one
brother turned to the other and said, "Did you see what was in that
bed in our room the other night?" and the other answered, "Yes."
That was all the conversation they had on the matter, yet they had
both seen a dead body in the bed.
⁵⁰

Norfolk was also impatient of politicians with their meandering
style and clever evasions, being himself devastatingly direct and
monosyllabic. When in 1970 his trainer was fined £500 by the Jockey
Club for irregular practices, the Duke determined to have nothing
more to do with them. He would not enter into an argument, and
never forgave them. One of the reasons he got on so well with Richard
Dimbleby, for whom he wrote an obituary in
The Times,
was because
Dimbleby had a businesslike attitude similar to his own. He could not
bear fuss or delay.

Norfolk married Miss Lavinia Strutt, a Protestant, in 1937. They
had four daughters, and no son. The dukedom passed in 1975 to Lord
Beaumont, Baron Howard of Glossop, who is descended from the
13th Duke of Norfolk. In 1966 Bernard Marmaduke had settled a
million pounds on Lord Beaumont's son, Edward, born in 1956.

However austere, aloof and correct he may have appeared, Norfolk
enjoyed respect for his profound sense of duty and public service,
and affection for his obvious belief that the aristocracy must set an
example by getting down to the job in hand and doing it well. This
affection is something for which his training did not prepare him, and
it was the only aspect of his public life which troubled his calm. Just
before the coronation in 1953 he gave a press conference after which
the assembled journalists, many of radical persuasion, rose to their
feet in unison and gave him a spontaneous applause which visibly
surprised him. And at the coronation of George VI he found himself
mobbed by a Cockney crowd slapping him on the back and shouting
"Well done, Bernard!" He must have wondered what he had done
wrong.
⁵¹

The man who succeeded as 17th Duke of Norfolk in 1975 is in a
different style altogether. Being a remote cousin, he has come to the
title by a "wavy line" which would not have veered in his direction at
all if one of the late Duke's children had been a boy. He is not over-
impressed by his luck. "Succeeding by death is a poor way of getting
on," he says. "I am much prouder of having been a general."
⁵²

As Miles Fitzalan-Howard he graduated Bachelor of Arts at Christ
Church, Oxford, then proceeded into the Grenadier Guards, with a
thirty-year military career in front of him, rising to the rank of major-
general, and collecting various distinctions along the way (Maltese
Cross, C.B.E., C.B.). He was Director of Service Intelligence at the
Ministry of Defence for a period, and Head of the British Military
Mission to Russian Forces in Germany. He retired in 1967, and settled
to a more peaceful life with his wife Anne Maxwell, two sons, and
three daughters. Fitzalan-Howard then went into the City, as
director of a merchant bank.

Within four years, from 1971 to 1975, a giddy succession of titles
descended upon him. He succeeded his father as Baron Howard of
Glossop (which is where one finds the Norfolk connection. The title
of Howard of Glossop was created in 1869 for the second son of the
13th Duke of Norfolk as a "consolation peerage" to compensate for his
failure to get elected M.P. for Preston; he had represented Arundel
in the House of Commons for fourteen years from 1852 to 1868).
The following year his mother died, passing on to him her own more
ancient dignity, the barony of Beaumont, created in 1309 for the
second cousin of Edward II. This title fell into abeyance in 1895,
when the 10th Baron Beaumont killed himself accidentally with a
shotgun when crossing a stile. This man, happily for his descendant,
was converted to Roman Catholicism in 1880. The R.C. community
in England would have been very shaken with a Protestant Duke of
Norfolk. The barony was called out of abeyance in 1896 in favour
of the present Duke's mother, then aged two.

As soon as the mantle of Norfolk fell upon him, he accepted the
challenge ruefully, making no secret of his wish that the wavy line
had taken another direction. Never before the centre of so much
national attention, he takes publicity in his stride, with more of a
desire to please than his predecessor, less impatience, less
intolerance. The Howard bluntness, the cause of so much trouble
in the past and source of so much endearment in more recent
times, runs with undiminished vigour in Norfolk's veins. If he is
embarrassed by the fuss, he will say so.

* * *

By an apt coincidence, the dukedom of Somerset was restored in
the same year as the dukedom of Norfolk - 1660, 108 years after the
execution of Edward Seymour, the 1st Duke, and eighty-eight years
after the execution of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk. Thus
were the descendants of the rival families, once bitter enemies, restored
to their proper dignity at the same time. The man who then became
2nd Duke of Somerset for a month (he also died in 1660) was
William Seymour, great-grandson of the 1st Duke, and Marquess of
Hertford since 1641. He was a scholarly man, Chancellor of the
University of Oxford 1643-1647 and again in 1660, a natural
student. But it was for an adventure in love that the world knew his
name.

When Master William Seymour was fifteen years old he was the
object of passionate attentions from Lady Arabella Stuart, who was
then twenty-seven. This would be no more than cause for amusing
gossip were it not for the fact that Arabella was first cousin to
James I, being descended from Henry VII through Margaret Tudor
and therefore high in line of succession to the throne. No member
of the Royal Family was allowed to fall in love without the
Sovereign's approval, and James severely scolded his cousin, ordering
her to break off the affair, which was quite unsuitable. Not only was
William Seymour a pubescent boy, but he was not even
heir apparent
to his grandfather's title of Earl of Hertford, being a second son. The
future revival of the dukedom of Somerset was not then even con­templated, and it would not have fallen upon him anyway. Arabella
obeyed, but not without protesting that they were deeply and truly in
love. Events were to prove her sincere.

The affair resumed in 1610, by which time he was twenty-two and
she thirty-four. Their romance, more dramatic than any fiction, came
to a head when they married clandestinely at Greenwich, without
the King's consent, which, she being of royal blood, was essential.
They were discovered and imprisoned, he in the Tower, she at Lam­beth. They were treated with such leniency that he appears to have
been allowed to visit her in prison while he was still nominally in
chains himself. It was an easy matter for them to hatch a plot for
escape.

Arabella escaped first, dressed as a man. Seymour was to follow
her. He walked out of the Tower of London having changed clothes
with his barber, and hastened to the continent in search of his wife.
She, meanwhile, had been caught, and sent to the Tower. The young
lovers never saw each other again. She was confined in the Tower
for the rest of her short life, where she gradually lost her mind. She
was quite insane when she died in 1615. Seymour eventually came
back to England, married Frances Devereux, sister of the Earl of
Essex, in 1618, and led subsequently a more sedentary life. He died
four weeks after being restored as 2nd Duke of Somerset in 1660.
⁸³

The Dukes of Somerset then went into a decline more absolute and
more hedged in obscurity than the Dukes of Norfolk. The 3rd Duke
inherited at the age of eight, and died at the age of nineteen of an
unspecified "malignant fever" following a riotous libertine existence."
The 5th Duke (1658-1678) met his end in Italy at the age of twenty.
He was with some French friends who foolishly insulted the wife of a
Genovese gentleman called Horatio Botti. The touchy Italian knocked
on the Duke's door, and when he answered, shot him dead on the
spot.
⁵⁶

The 6th Duke of Somerset (1662-1748) was the brother of the
dead man, and was descended from a younger son of the 1st Duke.
He is the largest character in the Seymour gallery, an absurdly
pompous eccentric who holds a place in the history of the family
analogous to that held by Jockey of Norfolk in the Howard history.
There is a difference, however. Jockey of Norfolk, though he drank
too much, was loved. The "Proud Duke", 6th of Somerset, was
loathed.