The Dukes (24 page)

As an infant, he promised well. Evelyn has described the scene on Easter Day 1684, when the King went to chapel in Whitehall with three of his natural sons, the nineteen-year-old Duke of Northumber­land, Barbara's son,* the Duke of St Albans, Nell's son, nearly fourteen, and the little Duke of Richmond, aged twelve, whom Evelyn said was "a very pretty boy".
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There is also the endearing story which relates to his investiture as a Knight of the Garter when he was nine. He was required to wear the blue ribbon round his neck, with the medallion of St George hanging in front. But, whether his mother had advised him differently or whether the child was just confused and mistaken, he wore the ribbon across the left shoulder. The King was so delighted he ordered that this should be henceforth the custom, which it still is.
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Richmond's star began to sink with the death of Charles II in 1685. The dying King had asked his brother, now James II, to look after the boy, but James hated the Duchess of Portsmouth, and was unlikely to arrange matters to suit her pleasure. One of his first actions was to deprive Richmond of his position as Master of the Horse, on the grounds that he was too young to discharge his duties properly; Louise was furious."
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Richmond was, like his mother, given to petulance.

* No relation to the present line of dukes of Northumberland.

From his father, the 1st Duke inherited good looks, easy manners, grace and charm. From his mother he gained the fatal flaw of self- indulgence, which eventually ruined him. As a young man he was popular, but then he descended to such an abysmal level of drunken­ness and debauchery that he forfeited all the good opinions he had enjoyed. Saint-Simon wrote, with his usual clarity, that Richmond had been the most beautiful creature one could hope to cast eyes upon, and had become the most hideous. Swift was less harsh when he called him, simply, a "shallow Coxcomb"

One recognises his mother also in his unrelenting ambition. He enjoyed hunting, and fighting, was accounted a good soldier, but changed his allegiance whenever prompted by self-advancement. He fought for the French and for the English; he was a confirmed Protestant, and a convinced Catholic, and a Protestant again. In 1692 he married Anne, Lady Bellasis, by whom he had three children. Although he had by right of his titles lands in Scotland, England, and France, he took a liking to the Goodwood estate in Sussex, because it was near hunting land, and bought it from the Compton family in 1720. Here his descendants have lived ever since. He enjoyed the house for barely three years, dying in 1723 an unlamented grotesque old rake. His mother retained her beauty (Voltaire admired her in

old age), and died in Paris in 1734.

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Of the four ducal houses descended from Charles II, Buccleuch is the most distinguished and has been by far the most successful, if the accumulation of wealth be the measure of success. By exercising care and wisdom in the choice of wives over the generations, always from aristocratic families, and nearly always bringing property with them, the Buccleuchs watched their lands expand until they covered nearly half a million acres in the nineteenth century. Of course, they have not just sat by idly totting up figures; they are a far from indolent race, and are well known for having managed their vast estates with exemplary acumen and devotion. When one of Gladstone's daughters, staying at Drumlanrig Castle, a Buccleuch estate in Dumfriesshire, asked the 5th Duke, "Where are the park walls?" he replied by pointing to the distant mountains.
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The possessions are now greater by far than any private land­owner not only in Britain, but in Europe. They started with Scottish estates derived from Buccleuch ancestors long before Charles II was born. To this they added the estates given by Charles to his errant son the Duke of Monmouth, who married into the Buccleuch family. When Monmouth was attainted for high treason in 1685 his dignities were naturally forefeited, but his Scottish peerages were regranted to his widow. The King then gave her the Monmouth property in England (though not the titles) which she promptly settled on the children. The 2nd Duke (1694-1751), Monmouth's grandson, lost ducal dignity by displaying an inappro­priate taste for women of the lower classes. He plunged into the meanest company and became an object of contempt to his peers. Lady Louisa Stuart wrote that he was "a man of mean understanding and meaner habits",
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by which she meant that he liked unkempt and uneducated women. He went so far as to marry one, a charwoman from Windsor called Alice Powell, who thereupon found herself a most incongruous Duchess of Buccleuch. But they had no children, and the curious Duke had already been married once before (to the Duke of Queensberry's daughter), from which union sprung his descendants in the Buccleuch and Queensberry line. His strange behaviour did, therefore, no lasting damage. His washerwoman duchess is buried in Wandsworth. He was also a spendthrift, recklessly chopping down his forests to make money from the sale of timber which he could spend on his "low amours". All in all, a quirky aber­ration in an otherwise regular descent.

Far more dangerous was the epidemic of smallpox which carried off many members of the family in 1750, almost threatening to wipe them out entirely. "Lord Dalkeith is dead of the smallpox in three days", wrote Walpole to Horace Mann. "It is so dreadfully fatal in his family, that besides several uncles and aunts, his eldest boy died of it last year; and his other brother, who was ill but two days, putrified so fast, that his limbs fell off, as they lifted the body into the coffin."
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The title had to pass to a grandson.

The. 3rd Duke of Buccleuch (1746-1812) consolidated the family fortune in three ways: he inherited from his mother, a daughter and heiress of the Duke of Argyll, lands in Scotland; he inherited the Queensberry lands in 1810 on the death of his cousin the 4th Duke of Queensberry, with considerable estates in Dumfriesshire (including Drumlanrig Castle); he also, incidentally, became 5th Duke of Queensberry at the same time; and finally he married a daughter of the Duke of Montagu, through whom his family inherited Montagu lands, including the sumptuous Boughton House.

So, the estates of three different families have become united in the family of Buccleuch, namely those of Scott, Dukes of Buccleuch, Douglas, Dukes of Queensberry, and Montagu, Dukes of Montagu. This triple inheritance is reflected in the family surname of Montagu- Douglas-Scott.

His predecessor in the dukedom of Queensberry was the notorious old lecher the 4th Duke, known as "Old Q" (1724-1810). He was a famous figure in Regency London by virtue of his easily observable libido where young ladies were concerned. His house stood at the top of Piccadilly, Nos. 138 and 139, between Hamilton Place and Park Lane, sadly demolished in 1973. In sunny weather, Old Q would sit on his first-floor balcony, perched on a little cane chair and dressed in a blue coat and yellow breeches, a parasol over his head, ogling the ladies who walked beneath. He was a familiar sight to passers- by. He built an exterior flight of stairs from the balcony to street level, so that when he gave the nod to his messenger at the door below, a man called Jack Radford, Jack could fetch the pretty victims to the Duke's company without their having to pass through the house. Stories were told of orgies going on inside the house, and he is known, on one occasion, to have re-enacted in his drawing-room, with three beautiful London girls, the scene in Homer where the goddesses revealed themselves to Paris and desired him to choose which was the most beautiful.

Old Q pursued pleasure under every shape, "and with as much ardour at fourscore as he had done at twenty", wrote Wraxall. It was said that the old
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took a prominent part in the orgies, and went to extraordinary lengths to stimulate his flagging sexual powers.
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Love seems to have but rarely entered his life. He had as a young man a passion for Pelham's daughter, but they did not marry, perhaps because his dissipated habits made him an unsuitable match. In fact, neither Old Q nor Miss Pelham ever married. He fathered a natural daughter, to whom he showed little affection. "I wish I could make him feel as he ought, but one may as well wash a brick", wrote Warner to Selwyn. Lady Louisa Stuart was yet harsher. "What or whom did he ever love ?" she asked.

When age had made a ruin of his body, with sight in only one eye, hearing in only one ear, practically toothless and full of aches and pains, a man whom Thackerary called "a wrinkled, palsied, toothless old Don Juan",
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his mind remained alert, his memory clear, his judgement sound. Wraxall averred that Old Q had more common sense than anybody he knew. Raikes described him as a "little, sharp- looking man, very irritable, and swore like ten thousand troopers".
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He also said he was mean, which does discredit to Raikes, for Old Q was always generous to his friends, to a degree rare in any age.

One instance of craftiness rather than meanness was the terms on which he paid his doctor, who slept at his bedside every night for the last six years of the Duke's life. He was paid a handsome daily rate while he lived, on the understanding that the doctor would receive not a penny when he died; Old Q loved life so much, he thought this a sensible insurance to prolong it. He also bathed in milk.

He could not bear to be bored. "What is there to make so much of in the Thames," he said, "I am quite tired of it. There it goes, flow, flow, flow, always the same."
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As his end approached in 1810 (an end which he unwittingly hastened by eating too much fruit), letters flooded in from women of every class and description, begging his favour. At least seventy letters littered his bed, unopened. Everyone panted to know how he would distribute his fortune. With little strength remaining, he mut­tered that he wanted to alter his will, since he decided it was foolish to leave legacies; everything belonged to Bonaparte, he rambled on, and therefore all distribution was idle. He died before he was able to put this intention into effect. The will gave away most of his fortune of £900,000 in twenty-five codicils leaving specific bequests, including £600 a year to the cashier at his bank. The male servants were provided for, but not one of the female, not even his house­keeper. And the doctor, Mr Fuller, was omitted according to the bargain.
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Old Q was one of the last aristocrats to keep up the practice of having a running footman beside his coach. Any candidate for the post would be made to dress up in full livery, then run up and down Piccadilly, while the Duke observed and timed him from his balcony. One such man, after his trial run, came before the balcony, panting. "You will do very well for me," said Old Q from above, imperiously. "And your livery will do very well for me," replied the man, who promptly ran off with it.
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The other Buccleuch ancestor, the Duke of Montagu, was eccen­tric in quite a different way. He was given to excesses of generosity. He once met an unkempt man on a walk in the Mall, dressed in rags, and invited him to dine the following Sunday. He learnt that the man's wife and family lived in penury in Yorkshire. When the man arrived for dinner, the Duke told him he had some pleasant people for him to meet, opened the door of the dining-room, and there revealed wife and children brought down by the Duke from York­shire. He called his lawyer, and there and then settled an annuity of £200 upon the astonished man.
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By the time the 5th Duke of Buccleuch (1806-1884) came into his titles at the age of thirteen, nine years after Queensberry's death, his various estates had swollen to a phenomenal size, and the self-assured youth was accounted important enough to be able to entertain George IV at Dalkeith House in Edinburgh for two weeks, when he was only sixteen years old. In adult life he was Lord Privy Seal and Lord President of the Council, but his brief foray into politics was not successful. Greville unkindly called him "worse than useless" in Peel's government, though he acknowledged that Buccleuch was good- humoured. Like all his family he was most successful as a landowner, wearing his shepherd's trousers and his peaked cap.
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He was im­mensely popular with his tenants, and easy to get on with, equally at home with the peasant as with the prince, and had only one form of address for both. (One of his descendants is Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, whose surname is Douglas-Scott-Montagu.)

This duke, obviously an endearing character, kept all his houses ready for occupation by their owner at any moment (and there were nine of them, plus three others which he did not use). But he and his duchess felt very keenly that it was a matter of social duty to share these vast inheritances. So they literally kept open house. For three months every year Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland was a home for anyone who wanted to invite himself. He could bring his entire family, and retinue if he had one, and stay as long as he wanted. No one was ever refused or turned away as long as there was an empty bedroom in the house. This custom naturally encouraged an army of opportunists, but the family rule was to welcome everyone, notwith­standing their motives or the degree of their acquaintance with the Duke. All you had to do was write to him and tell him you were coming.
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The ease of manner, so characteristic of the Buccleuchs, survives into the twentieth century. The 8th Duke, who died in 1973, found it peculiarly distasteful to be treated according to rank. He was hap­piest entertaining people on any one of his huge estates, managing his farms, or hunting. The expertly bred Buccleuch hounds are one of the few remaining family packs, founded by the 5th Duke. He was one of the country's experts on forestry, and planted more than a million trees every year on his own lands. But his real genius lay in preserving his family possessions. Other twentieth-century dukes have been forced by overwhelming death duties and other burdensome taxes which come with the egalitarian age to sell much of their land, in some cases all of it, or to open their homes to the public. Buccleuch never had to sell an acre, and still managed to run three vast private homes, with a considerable domestic staff. In 1923 he formed a private company. Buccleuch Estates Ltd, which owns and runs all his property, and in the early 1950s he settled the major part of his personal shareholding on his son the Earl of Dalkeith (the present Duke), in consideration of his marriage, thus neatly avoiding an esti­mated £10,000,000 in death duties. Whenever he did sell, it was a painting or two, never land, and there is still an art collection left in his private hands worth millions. This is perhaps why the Duke of Buccleuch's wealth continued while other ducal houses were handed over to trustees and their owners struggled to keep going. A senior member of the Royal Household once observed that if the possessions of the Queen and the Duke of Buccleuch were offered to auction he would not care to say which would fetch the higher price.
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And the Director of the Louvre Museum in Paris was heard to apologise to the Duke that the French furniture on display could not hope to match the Duke's private collection.