The Dukes (4 page)

               Argyll                                                (1701)

              Atholl                                                 (1703)

              Montrose                                            (1707)

              Roxburghe                                        (1707)

(
plus
Lennox, 1675, and Queensberry,
1684, held respectively by the
Dukes of Richmond and Buccleuch).

Dukes of Great Britain

Portland
                                             (1716)

Manchester
                                         (1719)

Newcastle
                                          (1756

Northumberland                                  (1766

(plus
Brandon, 1711, held by the
Duke of Hamilton).

Dukes of Ireland

Leinster
                                  (1766)

Abercorn                                 (1868)

Dukes of the United Kingdom

Wellington                              (1814)

Sutherland                               (1833)

             Westminster                           (1874)(

             Fife                                         (1900)    

(plus
Gordon, 1876, held by the
Duke of Richmond, and Argyll, 1892,
held by the already Scottish
Duke of Argyll).

This list is also useful in so far as it reproduces the strict order of
precedence of the dukes, in the pyramid of hierarchy in England at
the peak of which sits the Queen. Above the dukes are only five male
members of the Royal Family in direct line of succession, the
Archbishops of Canterbury and York, the Prime Minister, Lord
High Chancellor, Lord President of the Council, Speaker of the
House of Commons, Lord Privy Seal, and High Commissioners and
ambassadors. The question of precedence has given much vexation to
the duchesses (most of the dukes could not give a damn), and, as we
shall see, has provided entertaining fun and games over the years. As
dukes of England take precedence above dukes of all four other
peerages, the Duke of Rutland goes before the Duke of Hamilton,
whose title is older and whose pride, in the last 200 years, has been
more easily injured. It also means that the Duke of Abercorn, whose
family has not been particularly active, takes precedence above
Wellington, the saviour of his country, and whose title is older by
some fifty years, because Abercorn's dukedom is in the peerage of
Ireland, and Wellington's only in the peerage of the United Kingdom.

It is a commonplace that dukes are boring. "How dull! Bless me!
We are eleven of us, Dukes and Duchesses, and most dukefully dull
we are," wrote Sarah Spencer when she accompanied Queen Victoria
on a visit to Woburn Abbey in 1841.
⁸
That may have been true in
the presence of the Queen, but they must all have been behaving
quite
out of character. Some of the dukes and duchesses who fill these pages
are for the most part, supremely un-dull, they are bizarre, intransigent,
naively selfish, eccentric, monumentally self-confident, and with a
strong streak of delinquency in their natures. They are the kind of
people who, placed on stage in a modern play, would have to be
written down to be made credible. Of course there are exceptions -
there have been and still are, shy dukes whose ancestors have used
up all the self-confidence in the family genes and left none for them;
there have been some who were malleable, ordinary - but it is tedious
to qualify with exceptions all the time, and one is justified in
attempting certain common characteristics, shared by most dukes at
one time or another.

Their delinquency has enabled them to plunge indomitably through
life with no regard for anything but the expression of their large
personalities, with no need to question motives, and in the knowledge
that no one will ask them to explain themselves. They do not look over
their shoulders, nor even to the side, nor do they make allowances;
they do not need to cultivate imagination - that is for others. With
self-confidence as their shield, they can be rude, downright, rough,
interfering, frank. They say what they mean and mean what they say.
They can be sulky and critical, obedient to moods rather than
opinions, moods of sweeping intensity and terrifying instability. They
are easily irritated, and do not flinch from showing it. If they wanted
to spit, they spat; duchesses could scratch their backs, and dukes their
crutches, with impunity, because there was no one to tell them not
to. This is not to say that dukes behave as boorishly as this
paragraph suggests, but it does mean that the streak of impudence, of
let's
-see
-what-we-can-get-away-with prankishness, and of sheer block-
bustering obduracy, are strong enough in the inheritance for them
to be tempted to respond in like manner, and for one to catch glimpses
in them of ancestral arrogance.

What else ? There is a rich vein of lunacy in many a ducal house.

I know that there is plenty of evidence of madness among dustmen or
stockbrokers, and do not wish to labour the point, but when you
consider that there have been mentally unstable people in the
families of Howard (Dukes of Norfolk), Beauclerk (Dukes of St
Albans), Hamilton (which affects the Dukes of Hamilton and Dukes
of Abercorn), Murray (Dukes of Atholl), Fitzgerald (Dukes of
Leinster), Cavendish-Bentinck (Dukes of Portland), Russell (Dukes
of Bedford), and most recently Grosvenor (Dukes of Westminster),
you see that over a third of the ducal families have borne the taint,
and some descendants may still do. Of the other two-thirds,
almost all have produced at least one duke whose eccentricities were so
bizarre as to make his sanity questionable. I think it is safe to say that
this is somewhat above the national average, and must bear some
examination. The simplest explanation lies in persistent intermar­riage, but I suspect there is a less demonstrable cause in that
delinquency mentioned earlier, in the pure self-indulgence in which
dukes have always been encouraged and which occasionally has
toppled over the edge of civilised normality. Left to do as we please,
we would all indulge those whimsical fantasies we privately nurture,
and when we found that no one was there to contain us, we could with
ease release ourselves totally from reality. This is what happened to
the 5th Duke of Portland, and to many of the Dukes of Bedford.
With others, however, the imbecility has been medical in character.

On the other hand, the mysteries of genetic inheritance are such
that intermarriage between relations can often be beneficial, by
preserving and repeating a strain of especial brilliance, or, even better,
by combining two such strains which are themselves the product of
four previous brilliant people. The result is that the number of
remarkable men and women produced by ducal families is also far in
excess of the national average. There are, for instance, no ordinary
Russells; they have either been brilliant politicians, splendid speakers,
stylish writers, or something has gone wrong and they have turned out
bizarre and eccentric. The Cavendish family has produced scores of
men with splendid intelligence and wisdom, with political sagacity, or
simply with style. There is more than a fair share of great people
among the Churchills, the Howards, the Grosvenors, and the Percys,
while the family of the Duke of Richmond, producing one admirable
person after another in almost unbroken succession, is practically an
advertisement for the benefits of keeping marriage within a small
circle of proven ability.

Reserve is another common characteristic of only recent evolution.
Over the last 150 years it has become the norm for dukes decently to
abstain from publicity. The rule has taken some hard knocks from the
Duke of Bedford, the late Duke of Leinster, and the late Duke of
Argyll, but otherwise a "low profile" is still generally observed.

Some dukes, while dispensing tremendous generosity to tenants and
dependants, have been curiously mean to family and friends. For this
I can find no explanation, but it occurs frequently enough, in up to
half the ducal families, to warrant notice. No one can surpass the
Dukes of Marlborough in this respect, while it has happened so often
in the Dukes of Somerset that the present Duke has been left with
only the bricks and mortar of his ancestral home, the rest of his
inheritance having been hived off or dispersed by his ancestors. "What
will you do with your money when you die?" a friend asked a miserly
nobleman. "You have no children and you can't take it with you,
and if you could it would melt."
⁹

Heirs to a dukedom were generally educated to a spartan life,
with appalling nursery food, and little, if any, parental affection. This
was supposed to teach them self-reliance, but more often it had the
effect of breeding those eccentricities which the adult developed in
seeking to gratify all those desires denied him in infancy. One Duke
of Manchester, for example, was fed on porridge for breakfast,
bullock's heart and potatoes for lunch, bread and milk for tea.
¹⁰
Is it any wonder he should grow into a selfish luxuriant? The
1st Duke of Hamilton in adulthood slept every night in nightshirt,
nightcap, bedsocks and night cravat, in a red damask bed heated by
a warming-pan. "He slept on the suffocating softness of a feather
mattress, between linen sheets, beneath anything from two to six pairs
of blankets and two or three quilts. He slept in a propped-up position
on bolsters and pillows, and of course he slept with the curtains of his
bed pulled tightly shut."
¹¹
There was also a coal fire burning in
the bedroom, all of which might seem absurd until one remembers
that the Duke was probably over-compensating for a childhood in
which he all but froze to death.