The Dukes (28 page)

The Duke had been married twice, has four sons and a daughter. His duchess is a slightly bohemian figure, born in Malaya and brought up in France, who for many years ran the Upper Grosvenor Art Galleries. The couple lived in a leasehold house in Chelsea, overlooking the Albert Bridge, with four bedrooms. They built on to it an art gallery, which housed the Duke's fine collection of family pictures, assembled mostly by his own efforts, and beautifully lit. They now live in an apartment in Monte Carlo.

What of the St Albans heirlooms? There is the Bishop Juxon ring, given by Charles I just before his execution; some miniatures and jewellery belonging to Nell Gwynn; and an exquisite seal of ivory, in the shape of a falcon, which most probably belonged to the 9th Duke.

The property has all disappeared. Bestwood Park, which had been given to Nell Gwynn and on which had been constructed a house resembling St Pancras Station, was sold in 1940. Holly Lodge, scene of Harriot's parties, was sold by auction in 1906 after the death of Baroness Burdett-Coutts, and since demolished. At one time the Duke tried to buy from Richmond Borough Council the house at Hampton Court which had associations with Nell Gwynn and which was popularly thought to be haunted by her ghost. But the Council demolished it. There is perhaps injustice in all this, as Nell was, after all, the most loyal of Charles's mistresses. She was far too sensible
a
girl ever to expect justice; she would not have been surprised.

St Albans has inherited from Charles II a jovial nature, easy to laugh and anxious for life to proceed smoothly and happily. If it does not, he is bewildered rather than bitter. He is discomfited by strangers, only at ease when they show they do not expect any special kind of behaviour. He does not take his seat in the Lords, nor possess the coronet and robes to which his rank entitles him. Embarrassment prevents him more than anything else. "I don't enjoy dressing up," he says, and one must agree that the ducal robes would sit uncomfort­ably on his shoulders. He has a passionate interest in his family and an inalienable fondness for Charles II. The Duke also believes that one of his ancestors, the de Vere Earl of Oxford, was Shakespeare, or part of him. He says that Shakespeare must have been a composite man, a team of lawyers, doctors, soldiers, and men of letters, and that Oxford was part of the team. A portrait of the Earl has pride of place in the Chelsea home.

This genial man is still Grand Falconer of England. But the right to drive down Birdcage Walk,
^[5]
previously shared by the monarch and the Duke, has gone. The rootlessness of the dukedom, deprived of any inherited lands, is a sadness for which the Duke once made symbolic compensation: above the front door of his house in Chelsea, in thick

black letters, was the word
st albans
.

* * *

It is splendidly apt that the descendants of Louise de Kerouaille - the Dukes of Richmond — should be more closely involved with the political life of the country than any of the other offspring of Charles II, for Louise was the most politically minded of his mistresses, and the very affair which gave birth to the 1st Duke was a successful exercise in political strategy. Not only that, but it is refreshing to find a line which has been universally popular, instead of a clutch of historical references which are derogatory or contemptuous. One welcomes the opportunity to celebrate an exceptional family.

Hervey, whose pen was usually dipped in poison, said of the 2nd Duke that he was "friendly, benevolent, generous, honourable, and thoroughly noble in his way of acting, talking, and thinking".
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Praise from such a quarter is not to be taken for granted.

The story of the 2nd Duke's marriage is one of the strangest recorded. The Duke (1701-11750) was eighteen years old when he married Lady Sarah Cadogan, daughter of the 1st Earl of Cadogan; she was thirteen. The marriage had been arranged to settle a gambling debt between their parents. Immediately after the ceremony the girl was sent back to school and the young man was packed off to the continent with his tutor; he did not set foot in England again for three years. When he did return, he had such an unpleasant memory of his wife that, to avoid her, he spent his first evening at the theatre. There he was captivated on sight by a beautiful girl whom he determined to get to know. He asked who she was, and could he be introduced. "The reigning toast," he was told, "the beautiful Lady March" — his wife. One might say they fell in love at second sight.

From that moment they had an idyllic marriage, sustaining the comfort and excitement of first love all their lives. Long after their children were grown, Walpole saw them at a ball, and wrote: "The Duke sat by his wife all night, kissing her hand."
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She bore him twelve children, most of whom enjoyed the famous Richmond good looks, and was pregnant twenty-seven times. "She has a belly up to her chin", wrote Hervey, "and looks mighty well. His Grace is in great anxiety for her welfare, and a boy."
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At the same ball as that referred to above, "the two beauties were the Duke of Richmond's two daughters, and their mother, still handsomer than they". The daughters continued the romantic traditions of their parents; Lady Caroline Lennox eloped with Henry Fox (later Lord Holland), and Lady Emily married, against advice, the future 1st Duke of Leinster. George III was in love with a third daughter, Lady Sarah, and used to blush whenever he saw her.

The Duke was a member of Parliament (as Lord March), a Knight of the Garter, and a soldier, a fellow of the Royal Society, and Presi­dent of the Society of Antiquaries. As much as 250 years before the safari park obsession took hold of some noble houses, Richmond established a private zoo at Goodwood, which contained five wolves, two tigers, one lion, two leopards, three bears, monkeys, eagles, and "a woman Tyger" and a "new animal he is very fond of which he calls a mangoose".
¹²⁴
He was free of any snobbery about rank and status which, while not worthy of comment nowadays, was rare enough in the eighteenth century and was carried almost to revolutionary pitch by his son the 3rd Duke.

When he died he was genuinely lamented. Fielding called him "the late excellent Duke of Richmond". His wife died of grief not long afterwards.

The 3rd Duke of Richmond (1735-1806) was, like his father, of "an amorous disposition" and "a charming fine boy". He was deeply affectionate, and impetuously generous. "His person, manners, and address were full of dignity, and the personal beauty which distinguished Mile de Kerouaille was not become extinct in him." He was "easy and accommodating in his manners and society".
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Yet he is chiefly remembered for his effect on public life. One might almost call him a Socialist, so far in advance of his time were his extremely radical views. He introduced a Bill for Parliamentary Reform which even at the beginning of the twentieth century would have been considered intemperate. In 1730 only one person in six was entitled to vote, and most of the important seats in the House of Commons were within the gift of private landowners. Richmond's Bill proposed that there should be universal suffrage above the age of eighteen (which did not happen until the election of 1970), that elections should be held every June, and that the country should be divided into 558 equally populous districts. The Bill was rejected without a division.

He was a tireless campaigner for the reform of abuses in govern­ment, always ferretting, always posing awkward questions. He wanted the Civil List, which he thought wasteful and lavish to a shameful degree, to be severely cut. That proposal, too, was defeated.

On the matter of American independence, Richmond was again more to the left than any other nobleman. He said that the resistance of the colonists was "neither treason nor rebellion, but is perfectly justifiable in every possible political and moral sense". It is no wonder that he terrified his political colleagues with such pronouncements, and alienated public opinion. One M.P. said that if there were two Dukes of Richmond in the country he would not live in it.
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George III is reported to have said "there was no man in his dominions by whom he had been so much offended, and no man to whom he was so much indebted, as the Duke of Richmond".
¹²⁷

His personal integrity and high-minded fight against abuses were so far beyond question that he retained the guarded affection of even those who could not stomach his views. He was not a man to bear grudges, though his austerity and tactlessness sometimes gave the opposite impression.
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His one fault was to be pompously pleased with his own rectitude. Still, Walpole trumpeted his unequalled honour, said he was one of the virtuous few, and incapable of an unworthy action. "I worship his thousand virtues beyond any man's", he wrote.

"He is intrepid and tender, inflexible and humane beyond example. I do not know which is most amiable, his heart or his conscience. He ought too to be the great model to all our factions. No difference in sentiments between him and his friends makes the slightest impression upon his attachment to them."
¹²⁹

One other achievement was to open the first ever School of Antique Sculpture in England, financed by the Duke and housed in his Whitehall home, as early as 1758, some ten years before the foundation of the Royal Academy.

Richmond married Lady Mary Bruce, a descendant of Robert Bruce, but she died without issue. By his housekeeper, Mrs Bennett, he had three daughters, to whom he left £50,000 each, and another daughter by a Miss Le Clerc.

His successor, the 4th Duke (1764-1819), was his nephew. Once more, whatever references one can find testify to the inherent good nature of this agreeable family. Sir Robert Peel wrote : "I never knew a man of whom it could be said with so much justice that he was always anxious to find an excuse for the misconduct of his friends, and to put the most charitable construction on the acts of every human being."
¹³⁰
It is probably true to say that Charles II is more faithfully represented in the Dukes of Richmond than in any of his other descendants. They carry the King's happy disposition in their posterity, his good companionship, his soft nature.

The 4th Duke inherited the family's good looks ("the finest formed man in England"),
¹³¹
and married Charlotte, daughter of the Duke of Gordon. This was the Duchess who gave the most famous party in history, the so-called "Waterloo Ball" on 15th June 1815, at a coach- maker's depot decorated to look like a ballroom, in the rue de la Blanchisserie in Brussels. It was the night before the Battle of Waterloo, and is remembered for having been a psychological weapon against Napoleon; Wellington received the news of the French attack at Charleroi while he was at the ball, and calmly proceeded with his dinner. Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, met someone in her youth who had been present at the Waterloo Ball, and was still telling the story in the 1970s.

The 'Waterloo' Duchess brought the Gordon estates into the Richmond family, and eventually the re-creation of the Gordon dukedom, bestowed on her grandson. The Duke died in Canada of an agonising disease.' He was infected by hydrophobia by a rabid fox, and the only way in which he could secure medical attention (not that that could have saved him) was to sail up the St Lawrence. The sight of that vast expanse of water brought on successive violent fits, yet he fought his impulses and made the journey which must have been a slow thumbscrew of pain to him. Eventually, he could take it no longer. He begged to be rowed to dry land, then ran full pelt as far from water as possible. He died in a forest bam.

The 5th Duke, his son, had a distinguished political career, was a cabinet minister, and was tipped as Prime Minister after Wellington. He was, yet again, much liked, frank and open, and adored by his tenantry, but Greville left us a picture of political blundering which is far from flattering. Greville allows that he was a very good debater, good-humoured, a "good fellow" and an excellent friend, and readily admits that his colleagues held him in high regard, but adds that in his view he was "utterly incapable". He goes on: "He has, in fact, that weight which a man can derive from being positive, obstinate, pertinacious, and busy, but his understanding lies in a nutshell, and his information in a pin's head." In one of the most consummate portraits of character, at which Greville is so singularly adept, he brings to life this amiable man in a few telling but impolite words: "He happens to have his wits, such as they are, about him ... is prejudiced, narrow-minded, illiterate, and ignorant, good-looking, good-humoured, unaffected, tedious, prolix, unassuming, and a Duke."
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The 6th Duke (1818-1903) was a personal favourite with Queen Victoria, who created him Duke of Gordon in 1876 (only one other fresh dukedom has been created since that date, the dukedom of Fife). This means that the present holder of the title has more dukedoms than any of his colleagues in that dignity. He is a duke four times over, being Duke of Lennox, Duke of Gordon, and Duke of Aubigny as well as Duke of Richmond. Another distinction is the number of Knights of the Garter there have been in the family; out of only nine Dukes, the first seven were invested K.G.

The present Duke of Richmond, born in 1904, might with justice be called 'the reluctant Duke'. He was not meant to inherit the titles, being the third son of the 8th Duke, but his eldest brother died in infancy, and the second brother, who was destined to be the heir, was killed in Russia in 1919. So Frederick Gordon-Lennox found himself prospective landlord of 280,000 acres, when in truth he would have been perfectly happy as a garage mechanic.

Both he and his brother were fascinated by machines. It was the age when both the motor-car and the aeroplane were young and dangerous. Their grandfather, the old 7th Duke, was very disapprov­ing and thought them little short of revolutionary to show interest in such unsuitable subjects. But "Freddie", on coming down from Oxford, worked in a car factory, on the shop floor, as plain "Mr Settrington". "It was the happiest time of my life," he says.