The Dukes (34 page)

In addition to the Bedford estates, various dukes have had small private properties scattered over the country, to which they have liked to escape. Duke Herbrand had a favourite house in Scotland. His Duchess (the "flying Duchess") paid £2 a year for a cottage between Orkney and Shetland where she indulged her bird-watching. She also had a house near Midhurst, where she constructed a runway for her aircraft, but she never lived there. There was a house on Chiswick Mall in London, which still bears the name "Bedford House", and which the present Duke once vainly attempted to buy back into the family.

The most sumptuous jewel in the Bedford crown was (and is) Woburn Abbey and its park, over 3000 acres surrounded by eleven and a half miles of brick walls. The house itself, built at different stages by Inigo Jones, Henry Holland, and Henry Flitcroft, is an elegant, reticent masterpiece, and was the scene of some of the most gracious living in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Walpole, who spent a week there in 1751, said that he admired rather than liked it,
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but Greville was ecstatic in his praise on several occasions. When­ever he could pause from writing disparaging remarks about the Bedfords he sprang into lyrical effusions about their home: "a house abounding in every sort of luxury and comfort, with inexhaustible resources for every taste . . . the house, place, establishment, and manner of living are the most magnificent I have seen. There is no place which gives so splendid an example of a Great English Lord as this. The chasse was brilliant; in five days we killed 835 pheasants, 645 hares, 59 rabbits, 10 partridges, and 5 woodcocks ... I never saw such an abode of luxury and enjoyment . . . the management of the estates is like the administration of a little Kingdom. He has 450 people in his employment on the Bedfordshire property alone, not counting domestic servants . . . There is order, economy, comfort, and general content."
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Greville liked to be spoiled. He chose well, for at this time (1820-40) hospitality at Woburn was the most luxurious in England. Lady William Russell described it as "the most jolly life in Christendom".
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Some of this style of living, less "jolly" perhaps but almost as sumptuous, continued until the death of the 11th Duke, Herbrand, in 1940. Herbrand had a staff of well over 200, most of whom he never saw. Workpeople and gardeners used to station themselves at strategic intervals in the park so that they could pass signals to each other to disappear from view whenever the Duke was approaching; this was to spare him the unpleasant sight of a workman.
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He thought it not remotely odd that he should have fifty footmen with powdered hair, one of whom would stand behind the chair of each guest at dinner. Nor did it seem unduly extravagant to give each guest an individual gold tea-pot for breakfast. He never used the telephone in his life; that was part of modern living of which he preferred to remain ignorant.

Although Duke Herbrand visited London barely once a year, he kept two fully-staffed establishments in Belgrave Square, and eight chauffeurs. A guest to Woburn would be taken in one car, with chauffeur and private footman, while his luggage would travel with its own chauffeur and footman in another car. On the outskirts of London both cars would be met by two more, sent from Woburn, and passenger and luggage would transfer from one vehicle to another, with yet more uniformed footmen in attendance.
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There were more servants employed whose sole task was to polish the vast silver collection, and who were required to sleep in the room with it.
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The pages were clothed and fed, but were not paid.

Duke Herbrand did not regard his style of living as ostentatious; it would simply be silly for a nobleman to live in any other fashion. The realisation that many of his predecessors had earned a reputation for ostentation did not bother him (or did not occur to him). The worst offender was the 5th Duke, who succeeded in 1771 at the age of six, and never married. Like many a self-indulgent bachelor, he enjoyed making a display of himself. The waspish Walpole saw him on the occasion of the King's birthday, and wrote : "The Duke of Bedford eclipsed the whole birthday by his clothes, equipage, and servants: six of the latter walked on the side of the coach to keep off the crowd . . . their liveries are worth an argosie."
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He it was who sold the family estates in Hampshire and Surrey, to pay for more ostentation of his person, and an even grander style of living. He was not popular. Walpole makes an unkind reference to him when he came of age, and ordered the estate manager to have all his palaces ready for him. Until then, the Dowager Duchess, his grandmother, had been living in them in the style of a reigning monarch. The peacock young Duke would have none of this, and wanted to show off in his own glorious possessions. Besides, he had a mistress, the notorious Nancy Parsons

(Lady Maynard), who had already been mistress to two dukes, their Graces of Grafton and Dorset, and who was now in her fifties. Bedford wanted to establish her at Woburn, and not unnaturally met with some hard opposition from his grandmother. Walpole wrote:

"If it is only to make room for another antique old woman for old woman, I should think one's own grandmother might be preferable to one that, for many reasons, might be grandmother of half London."
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In the end, both the old women, one his grandmother, the other his mistress, lived there, glowering at each other from opposite wings.

This grandmother, by the way, the 4th Duke's duchess, was not without her own penchant for showing off. At George Ill's corona­tion in 1761 the Duchess of Queensberry said that the Duchess of Bedford looked "like an orange-peach, half red and half yellow".
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The 5th Duke died in 1801, aged only thirty-seven, and was succeeded by his brother as 6th Duke. This man, whom we have come across earlier in the chapter, was also, according to Greville, a sybarite who relished the display of his wealth; but Greville may well have mixed some ungenerous envy with his harsh remarks:

"A more uninteresting, weak-minded, selfish character does not exist than the Duke of Bedford. He is a good-natured, plausible man without enemies, and really (though he does not think so) without friends; and naturally enough he does not think so, because there are many who pretend, like Brougham, a strong affection for him, and some who imagine they feel it. Vast property, rank, influ­ence, and station always attract a sentiment which is dignified with the name of friendship, which assumes all its outward appear­ance, complies with its conditions, but which is really hollow and unsubstantial. The Duke of Bedford is a complete sensualist and thinks of nothing but his own personal enjoyments, and it has long been a part of his system not to allow himself to be disturbed by the necessities of others, or be ruffled by the slightest self-denials. He is affable, bland, and of easy intercouse, making rather a favourable impression on superficial observers; caring little (if at all) for the wants and wishes of others, but grudging nobody anything which does not interfere with his own enjoyments, and seeing with com­placency those who surround him lap up the superfluities which may by chance bubble over from his cap of pleasure and happiness. It is a farce to talk of friendship with such a man, on whom, if he were not Duke of Bedford, Brougham would never waste a thought."
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Some of the dukes have swung to the very opposite point, and been positively mean. The 7th Duke, who had all the income from his estates, begrudged making an allowance to his brother, Lord John Russell, who had only what he earned, on which he had to support a wife and family, run a house suitable to a politician holding high office, entertain in a manner which his position demanded. Lord John regularly sent his bills to the Duke, who regularly settled them, but the younger brother suffered from the humiliation of this proceeding. A substantial annuity to Lord John would not have made the difference of a comma to the Duke's riches, but he would not make one. ". . . his love of money is so great that he cannot bring himself . .. to do a generous thing on a great scale", wrote one of his best friends. "His colossal fortune, which goes on increasing every day, and for which he has no use, might well be employed in making his brother easy, and in buying golden opinions for himself; but the passion of avarice and the pleasure of accumulation outweigh all such consider­ations."
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Again, "he thinks nothing but rolling up enormous savings which he cannot take with him and which he does not care to distribute".
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Disraeli told Queen Victoria that Bedford considered accumulation the only pleasure of life, and that "he never retired to rest satisfied, unless he could trace that he had saved, that day, at least a five pound note".
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Similarly, the 12th Duke, Hastings, would not even allow his wife money to buy some presentable clothes, and his son and heir was expected to live on under £ 100 a year, and to find shirts that cost less than £3.

There is a story which relates to one Duchess of Bedford, wife to the 4th Duke, John. She gave a great ball at Woburn, but did not heat the grand house properly. Great houses were often cold and damp because it was the extraordinary habit in the eighteenth century to wash down the walls before giving a party. Some of the guests were uncomfortably cold. Three of them, Lord Lorn, George Selwyn and Horace Walpole (who, of course, tells the story), retired into a little room where there was a fire, and huddled round. The Duchess saw them, and said nothing, but minutes later a workman appeared with tools ready to take the door off the hinges.
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While Woburn glittered with resplendent dances, the money to pay for them came from the London properties. At one time the Duke of

Bedford personally owned the whole of Bloomsbury from Tottenham Court Road in the west to Russell Square and Southampton Row in the east, from New Oxford Street in the south almost to Euston Road in the north, plus the whole of Covent Garden from Drury Lane westwards to St Martin's Lane and from the Strand north to Long Acre. Covent Garden was sold before World War I, but a sizeable portion of Bloomsbury still belongs to the Bedford Estates.

When the Covent Garden of St Peter's, Westminster, was given to John Russell, Earl of Bedford, in 1551, it was undeveloped pasture land and orchard, and for many years it offered an interrupted rural view from the rear of the Earl's London house in the Strand. It was the 4th Earl (father of the 1st Duke) who commissioned Inigo Jones to develop the land and make in the centre of it a splendid piazza in the Italian Renaissance style, the first in London. The Earl's old house was demolished, and a sumptuous new residence erected to harmonise with the general scheme. Houses on the piazza were let at high rents to noblemen and rich merchants. Later, permission was granted for dealers in fruit and vegetables to sell their wares along the back garden wall of Bedford House, thus taking the first step in a process which was to evolve into London's most famous fruit market. Eventually, the traders dominated the square, obliterating the elegance of its architecture. Of Inigo Jones's grand design, only St Paul's Church remains, and some of the arcades around the square which suggest former dignity. The rest has been demolished, or smothered in the surrounding maze of little streets.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Covent Garden had degenerated into a slum, and the Duke became the object of a sustained campaign to persuade him to clean it up.
Punch
led the attack, calling him "Duke of Mudford" and his estates "Mud-Salad Market" and "Gloomsbury". It was
Punch's
contention that Covent Garden was a disgrace to London; he compared His Grace of Mudford's negligence to the philanthropy of the Duke of Westminster, eventually goading Bedford into offering the site to the municipal authorities, who would not take it. There were cartoons showing the Duke lifting his robes above the squalid puddles of his streets.
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This was the 9th Duke, Hastings, the unhappy sour hypochondriac, who regarded the attacks as yet another indication of the depths to which mankind may sink. Besides, what was the point of having lucrative property if you had to spend money maintaining it? It was not thus that the parsimonious Russells made their millions. "If one hadn't a few acres in London in these times of agricultural depression, I don't know what one would do," he said.
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The Russell connection with Covent Garden was finally severed in 1914, when Duke Herbrand sold almost the entire estate to Sir Joseph Beecham (of Beecham's Pills, and father to Sir Thomas, the conductor). The price was £2 million, and there was sensational publicity at the time. War and the death of Sir Joseph complicated the sale, the estate passing from the Beecham family to a publicly owned property company after the Great War. The Duke retained his private box at the Royal Opera House until 1940. It had been his of right since the lease of 1793, and it had its own lobby, lavatory, fireplace dominated by the Russell arms, chimney stack, staircase, and entrance from the street. It is said that one could happily live in the Bedford box. It now belongs to Covent Garden Properties Ltd, and is used by them in total independence of the Opera House. Also exempt from the sale was 26 James Street, which final link was sold by the 12th Duke in 1945.
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Like Covent Garden, Bloomsbury was monastic land confiscated at the Dissolution, and awarded to a deserving nobleman. In this case, the land consisted of an unexciting manor-house, some farm buildings, and acres of grazing land, and the nobleman was the 1st Earl of Southampton. His descendant, the 4th Earl, developed the land and built a splendid piazza which rivalled the Covent Garden Piazza of his neighbour the Earl of Bedford, to the south. He built a mansion for himself and his family - Southampton House. When he died in 1667 his estates were divided between his three daughters (there was no son), and the portion containing Bloomsbury and Southampton House was allotted to Rachel. She subsequently married William, Lord Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford, and her property automati­cally passed into his ownership. The couple lived in Southampton House. William was beheaded, but his son, as 2nd Duke of Bedford, was the first to inherit the combined estates of Covent Garden and Bloomsbury, the first from his grandfather, 5th Earl and 1st Duke, the second from his parents and maternal grandfather, the Earl of Southampton. He owned both Bedford House and Southampton House, two London palaces within walking distance of each other. As he had married the Howland heiress at the age of fourteen, he owned other substantial houses and estates in Streatham and Tooting Bee as well.