The Dukes (55 page)

Lord Edward's loss was the most acutely felt because he was not merely a political fanatic, but a splendid man. As so often happens, his virtues endeared him even to those who detested his views. Lady Holland, admittedly a friend of the family, says, "Such was the winning character of poor Lord Edward that without patronage, wealth, no very superior abilities, he had the faculty of attaching men of all ranks to his person."
¹⁴
The modern vernacular has a less elegant shorthand for saying the same thing : he had the common touch.

His mother, the Dowager Duchess, had long since been widowed, and remarried, to an uncouth Scot called Ogilvie, whom she had engaged to tutor her younger children and fallen in love with. She had even produced a second family, of three daughters, making a total of twenty children. She shared her son Edward's passion for demo­cratic ideals, and was a fervent admirer of Rousseau. So, too, was the 2rid Duke of Leinster (1749-1804), her second son, and thereby a great-great-grandson of Charles II through the Richmond offspring. Leinster was a voluble Whig, perpetually getting to his feet in the House of Lords to make one protest after another against the government. He supported the United Irishmen unswervingly, for which he was virtually deified in Ireland. One historian describes him as "an honest, undeviating friend of the Irish nation".
¹⁵
The same author says that Leinster was generally respected as a public man and universally beloved as a private one. Other views are not so compli­mentary. He does not appear to have been very intelligent, his talents were seriously limited. He was the first Knight of the Order of St Patrick (founded to parallel the Order of the Thistle in Scotland). His wife, than whom "there was never more loveable creature breathing",
¹⁸
died of grief in 1798, a few weeks after the death of her beloved brother-in-law Lord Edward. The Duke himself died of strangury.
Town and Country
had revealed, twenty years earlier, that he kept a secret mistress.
¹⁷

His son, the 3rd Duke of Leinster (1791-1874) was again a Whig, again Lord Lieutenant of County Kildare, and again a Grand Master of Freemasons, like his father. He was Lord High Constable at the coronations of both William IV and Queen Victoria. He did not make much of a mark, and references to him are mostly inconsequen­tial. Creevey talks of his kindness and good humour, "he would not have minded brushing my coat if I had wanted it",
¹⁸
and others agree that he was a good sort. Our prime source is the doubtful one of Harriette Wilson, who thought him charming, but a stupid fool and a bore. She introduces him to us with characteristic verve: "Now the said Duke of Leinster being a very stingy, stupid blockhead, whom nobody knows, I will describe him. His person was pretty good; straight, stout, and middle-sized, with a good, fair Irish allowance of leg ... I never saw anything more decided in the shape of curls than those which adorned and distinguished Leinster's crop ... I do not see how a man could be well handsomer, without a mind. His Grace was at that time in the constant habit of assenting to whatever any­body said, good or bad. He was all smiles and sweet good-humour." She allows him to be a man of honour, and he comes through the pages, in spite of her bitchiness and almost without her awareness, as a man worth knowing. She is impatient with him; "I am not going to sit down all my life to love this fool", she writes. "I must have something for the mind to feed on", and one can quite believe that Harriette was cleverer than he. She pays tribute once more to his easy-going nature, noticed by others, in her usual back-hand way: "he never had anything on earth to recommend him to my notice, save that excellent temper".
¹⁹
Leinster's behaviour when Harriette betrays him does more than anything to reveal the man's qualities as well as his weakness. It seems clear that she was never his mistress, if only because he could easily be kept an obedient suitor without ever being granted the prize for which he was suiting. It was he who introduced her to Lord Worcester, the future Duke of Beaufort, whereupon her attentions turned away from Leinster to plunge into a real love affair. Leinster was chagrined. His friend had stolen his lady-love. It was too much. He asked Harriette, with dignity and decorum, kindly to refrain from making her affair with Worcester obvious until such time as he could decently leave the country, but he wished her well.

Harriette Wilson is not always reliable. She is generally valued for the vividness of her dialogue, not the veracity of her portraits. She is, however, corroborated by another, independent source. In 1816, when the Duke was twenty-five (some four or five years after his liaison with Harriette), he paid his respects to a sixteen-year-old heiress, Frances Anne Vane-Tempest, with a view to assessing her possibilities as his duchess. What he thought of her we do not know, but the young girl confided to her diary exactly what she thought of him. He was "not ill-looking, very amiable, of the highest rank and immense fortune, in short he was an unexceptionable parti. I met him frequently in Bruton Street, and always thought him dull. He did not propose to me but his grandfather Mr Ogilvy [that same rough Scots tutor who married the 1st Duchess of Leinster] did to my guardians. Mrs Taylor [her aunt and guardian] said she had no objection to him but she thought it a mercenary marriage on his part and said I was too young to marry for a year. My mother tormented me extremely [this was her other guardian]. She said she could not object to one so unobjectionable, but she balanced against his rank and merits so many defects, stinginess, love of Ireland, etc., that had I liked the Duke I should have been puzzled."
²⁰
Nothing came of the encounter. The Duke married a daughter of the Earl of Harrington two years later, and Frances Anne became the celebrated coal-owning Marchioness of Londonderry.

The 4th Duke of Leinster (1819-1887) had the unhappy experi­ence of living at a time when the ideas promulgated by his reforming ancestors took root in Ireland and incited the long bloody struggle to evict the English influence altogether. Protests were loud against the absentee landlord who charged extortionate rents for very little, and spent all the proceeds on amusing himself in London. The Duke of Leinster could not be counted among such people. He lived all his life among his tenants, and did all he could to improve their welfare and meet their demands. He even offered to sell them their land under the terms of Lord Ashbourne's Act, which provided for the advance by the Land Commission of the full purchase money to a tenant who agreed with his landlord to buy his holding, but the offer was rejected.* The FitzGeralds showed the Irish how to stand up for themselves, and the Irish stood up against the FitzGeralds. In revolution there is no room for demanding fair play.

*The Land Purchase Act of 1885

Leinster did not bother with politics. He wrote the history of his family,
Earls of Kildare,
an indispensable reference book, and had a happy marriage with one of the ubiquitous Leveson-Gowers, a daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. She died only a few months after him in 1887, when the title passed to his son, father of the 6th and 7th Dukes.

The 5th Duke of Leinster (1851-1893), who died of typhoid fever, also eschewed politics, leading a simple life with simple habits. The glamour of his existence derived from his wife Hermione, a daughter of the Earl of Faversham and, according to the Duke of Portland, one of the great beauties of the late Victorian era. Lady Londonderry has written of her "renowned beauty" and "strikingly brilliant com­plexion",
²¹
while a more recent author refers to her as "the beautiful tubercular Hermione".
²²
She died in the south of France, where she had repaired for her health.

These two deaths mark the virtual end of the long and illustrious history of a remarkable family. After seven centuries of influence and distinction, the Geraldines of Kildare enter upon a sad decline with the coming of the twentieth century. The 5th Duke and Hermione had three sons, the eldest of whom naturally succeeded as 6th Duke. It is upon the youngest boy, however, that we must concetrate our attention.

Lord Edward FitzGerald, born in 1892, was only eighteen months old when his father died, thus depriving him of a restraining influence which might have made all the difference to events. With the law of
primo geniture
effectively releasing him from any of the restrictions which accompany the responsibilities of a head of family, Lord Edward threw himself into a carefree and joyful youth. He was handsome, adventurous, and a lord; life was going to be fun. In 1913 he married, at Wandsworth Registry Office, an actress on the musical comedy stage, May Etheridge, one of the singers and dancers who are nowadays known under the generic name of "Gaiety Girls" (although they did not all perform at the Gaiety Theatre). It was one of the alliances between aristocracy and stage which was a part of life in Edwardian London. In 1914 their only son was born, and by the following year the marriage was at an end; they did not divorce until seventeen years later, but they had ceased to live together in 1915. He claimed later that he had never been in love with May Etheridge.

Lord Edward served with distinction in the Great War, as captain in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and was wounded. The war produced two events which were to shape his future. First, his next older brother, Lord Desmond, was killed in action in France in 1916, which placed Edward next in line for the dukedom. (Desmond died a hero's death. He threw himself on a bomb to save the lives of his colleagues.) Secondly, his eldest brother, the Duke, was afflicted with a tumour on the brain which rendered him a useless invalid, incapable of managing family affairs. The Leinster fortune was in the hands of trustees who, observing Lord Edward's style of living, did not wish to make him a handsome regular allowance which he would immediately waste. He, on the other hand, seeing that he would almost certainly come into the dukedom one day, as his brother would not marry and have children, saw no reason to cease enjoying life in his fashion. The result was, he ran up enormous debts.

In 1919 a receiving order was made against him as a bankrupt. It was then that he made the fateful decision to gamble away his inheritance.

A wealthy business man called Sir Harry Mallaby-Deeley proposed to advance Lord Edward £60,000 immediately, which would cancel his debts, in return for the sale of his reversionary life interest in the Leinster estates. In other words, for as long as he lived, any income due to him from the estate would go instead to Mallaby-Deeley and his heirs. To FitzGerald it seemed a reasonable chance to take. His brother was still a young man, and as long as he was alive, his own income from the estate was negligible or nil. The loan would get him out of a scrape
now
; he could deal with the future when it happened.

Unfortunately for Edward FitzGerald, his invalid brother died in 1922, and he became 7th Duke of Leinster, entitled to an income from the settled estates of £80,000 a year, but destined never to get a penny. The contract he had signed with Mallaby-Deeley was legal and binding. None of the family property would belong to him as long as he lived. There was even a clause in the contract which gave Mallaby-Deeley the right to prevent the Duke from doing anything which might shorten his life and so reduce the period for which he would legally own the Duke's estate. He insured the Duke's life for £300,000. The trustees offered to buy back the inheritance for £250,000, but Mallaby-Deeley would have none of it. He asked £400,000. The most he would grant was a purely voluntary gift of £1000 a year to the Duke. The Duke of Leinster had ruined himself, and there was nothing that anyone could do about it.

He showed little sign of being chastened. Another receiving order was made against him in 1923, but still he lived as if he were a rich man. It was not entirely his fault that he was trapped in a vortex of publicity which laid bare his every indiscretion. Deprived of his own money, he tried other ways of getting it. In July 1922 he laid a bet for £3000 that he could drive from London to Aberdeen in fifteen hours. He made the journey in fourteen and a half hours, covering 557 miles, no small feat in 1922. Unfortunately, he was summonsed for failing to produce a driving licence. On 15th July he was fined £2 for speeding (at thirty-eight and a half miles per hour!) and four days later he paid £5 for speeding on Constitution Hill (at thirty-three miles per hour). It transpired that he had previous convictions dating back to 1914.

The 1923 bankruptcy hearing showed a total debt of £25,300 listed by creditors. The income from the Leinster estates was protected from the claims of creditors and left absolutely in the discretion of the trustees, who would not release it. For the Duke, therefore, it was a
personal
debt; he had no remunerative occupation and no capital, his only source still being £20 a week.

There was some furniture left to him by the terms of his father's will (the 5th Duke). He thought he would sell this. Said the Official Receiver, "Are any steps being taken to release the furniture in Ireland?" to which Mr Salaman, the Duke's harassed solicitor, had to reply, "I am told that if anyone from England attempts to release it they will be shot."

A few months later the Duke was found guilty of obtaining credit on false pretences, and had to suffer the humiliation of a stern rebuke from the judge, who told him, "We treat everyone alike in these courts."
²³
He fled for a while to America. (Mallaby-Deeley later relented, and sold some of the Leinster property to pay off the creditors.)

The Duke retired to a life of comparative obscurity after these inauspicious beginnings, emerging to serve in World War II, and to marry three more times. May Etheridge died of an overdose of sleeping draught in 1935. He married, secondly, Raffaelle Kennedy. His third wife was also a musical comedy star, Denise Orme (real name Jessie Smithers), who had previously been twice married. The six children of her first marriage included the Duchess of Bedford (Lydia, the present Duke's second wife), Lady Cadogan, and Joan Aly Khan. The Duke of Bedford described her as "one of the most enchanting and fascinating characters I have ever met".