The Dukes (60 page)

Authors: Brian Masters

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BOOK: The Dukes

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Simplified, the revised patent provided for the title to pass to the eldest grandson of the 1st Earl, through his daughter, who had married a Drummond. There was a condition attached; the young Drummond would have to marry his first cousin Jean Ker (daughter of the dead Harry Ker), or the title would pass to another branch. Drummond dutifully obeyed. So, for the next hundred years, the holders of the Roxburghe title were the Drummond family, although they changed their name to Ker.

When the 4th Duke died in 1805, the Drummond line, descended from the 1st Earl's eldest daughter, died with him, and a grubby scramble followed to see who could legitimately grab the coronet.

There were four claimants to the dukedom - Lady Essex Ker, daughter of the 2nd Duke, and
heir of line
to the 1st Earl of Roxburghe; Mr Walter Ker,
heir male
to the 1st Earl; John Bellenden Ker,
heir male
of the 2 nd Earl (and second cousin to the Duke who had just died and who had fought for the succession to go to him, even entailing his estates upon him. Bellenden Ker was a noted botanist, wit and man of fashion); and Sir James Innes, who was descended from Margaret Ker, another daughter of the Harry Ker who caused all the confusion by dying too soon in the seventeenth century. There was another, less serious, claimant, a baker in Kingston, Jamaica, called Robert Hepburn Ker.
²⁵

The House of Lords discussed the problem for seven years, from 1805 to 1812, during which time the dukedom lay dormant. Thousands of pages of genealogical evidence, were produced by the. claimants, all carefully examined and weighed by their lordships. In the end; they had only to consult the original patent, which stated that if the heirs male of the 1st Earl's daughter
(i.e.
the Drummonds) should fail, as they did in 1805, then the honours should devolve upon the heirs male of his grand-daughter Margaret (his son Harry's daughter). By this rule, the heir was Sir James Innes, who thus became 5th Duke of Roxburghe in 1812, changed his name to Innes-Ker, and founded the branch of the family which flourishes today. He had spent £50,000 proving his right to inherit.

A word about the Innes family, which came into the picture for the first time in 1812. Sir James's father had been 28th Laird of Innes, the family having held Innes since Malcolm IV had conferred it upon their direct ancestor, Berowald Flandrensis, in 1160. But their fortunes had soured, and Sir James's father had been obliged to sell the ancient barony of Innes to his cousin in order to keep his family going. The dukedom of Roxburghe could not have come their way at a more opportune moment, with over 60,000 acres in Roxburgheshire and a thriving household at Floors Castle, all of which came with the titles; the House of Lords had set aside the 4th Duke's entailing of the estates upon John Bellenden Ker, without which the new Duke would have been just as poorly off as before. As it happened, he thoroughly enjoyed his new status, spending his closing years in peaceful retirement at Floors, with his pretty young wife. As James Innes, he had married in 1769, and his wife had died in 1807, in the midst of the succession crisis. One week after her death, he married again, and was eighty-one years old when his son and heir was born in 1816. I know of no more impressive record than that. The old man lived on to 1823.

Guy David Innes-Ker, the 10th and present Duke of Roxburghe, is a direct descendant of this Sir James Innes, who won the case in 1812. He is, at the time of publication, only twenty-one years old, but if the succession were not assured by his offspring, or other male descendants of the 5th Duke, then the honours would have to be traced back again to the original patent, and would fall on whatever male heirs there may be of any of Harry Ker's three daughters. It would certainly require the House of Lords to unravel the mess again. The dukedom of Roxburghe was the last dignity to be created in the peerage of Scotland, one day after the dukedom of Montrose in 1707. A fresh patent, more sensibly organised, could have been issued to designate the inheritors of the dukedom, but Queen Anne foolishly allowed the same remainder as had applied to the earldom.

It is difficult to assess the personality of the Roxburghe family, as those characteristics shown by the first four dukes can have little relevance at all to the following six, to whom they are only very distantly related. The first four, up to 1805, were Drummonds, the succeeding six, from 1812, have been Innes.

The first four Dukes of Roxburghe must not go unrecorded simply because they are not ancestors of the present Duke. They were all eminent, admirable, delightful men, and deserve to be remembered. To read contemporary reports of the 1st Duke in particular, who lived from 1680 to 1741, is to wish that one had known him. In the first place, he was thoroughly well educated, speaking Latin and Greek fluently, and most modern European languages. He was "a young gentleman of great learning and virtue", said Macky, and Lockhart describes him as "the best accomplished young man of quality in Europe", which is no small compliment from a political opponent. Add to this that he was very good-looking, "brown-complexioned and handsome", according to Macky. Further, he had such charm as to bewitch even those who disagreed with him. Patten agrees: ". . . with the agreeable Looks of good Humour, that by all that are so happy to be acquainted with him, he gains their Affection and Applause". The Duke clearly had a beautiful personality. Politically, he was a Whig supporter of the Hanoverian succession, and was opposed to Walpole, who is the only man to tell a discreditable story of him. Sir Robert Walpole claimed that Roxburghe had persuaded the Duke of Montrose to resign his position as Secretary of State on some scruple of conscience, then promptly applied for it himself. (It is true that Montrose held the position from 1714 to 1715, and Roxburghe from 1716 to 1725.) All one can say is that such self- seeking is so totally out of character that it would require more than the word of a political opponent to establish it. The Duke was a pall-bearer at the funeral of Newton in Westminster Abbey, 1727. His love of learning, his feel for books and for the knowledge they contained, were passed to his son (a friend of Fielding) and his grandson, the 3rd Duke and great book-collector.

The 3rd Duke of Roxburghe (1740-1804) was in some ways a sad man who took refuge from the injustice of life in his unique collection of books. As a young man, he had fallen in love with Christiana, the eldest daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburgh-Strelitz. It was a true match, so rare a thing in aristocratic marriages of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they would have made a supremely happy couple. They had every intention of marrying, but then her younger sister Charlotte became engaged to the English king, George III, and it was intimated to Roxburghe that it would be prudent of him to break off his courtship of Christiana. Presumably the King would have lost face if he could only catch a younger daughter when one of his Scottish noblemen could walk off with the prized eldest daughter. Whatever the case, Roxburghe obliged. Both he and Christiana never ceased to love each other, and neither of them married. The Duke smothered all his disappointments in bibliography. He became melancholy, retiring, spending hours and days at a stretch collating his rare editions. He and the King would compete even in that, and more than once Roxburghe would have the galling experience of conceding to the royal preference a book he dearly wanted. But they were friendly enough, and it is said the King was very fond of him. The collection grew into the finest in the kingdom, housed at the Roxburghe residence in St James's Square, and assuming a fame which has become legendary. He had an unrivalled collection of books from Caxton's press, and a collection of ballads without parallel (these are now in the British Museum).When the Duke died in 1804, there was no one to whom he could safely leave his collection. They passed by inheritance to his successor in the title, the 4th Duke of Roxburghe, but he was already an old man of seventy-six (a cousin of the book-collecting 3rd Duke), and had only months to live. He died in 1805, and as we have seen, the Drummonds, the Bellendens, the Kers and the Innes were thrown into turmoil by the question of the succession. Seven years later, Sir James Innes was called to Parliament as 5th Duke of Roxburghe, and one of his first actions was to sell off, by auction, the entire Roxburghe collection of rare books. With hindsight, this appears to have been a monstrously philistine act, with which we can have little patience. We know the Innes family were on hard times, and the motive for the sale can only have been financial. The new Duke was impoverished by the cost of proving his claim. However, it was a great event, lasting forty- five days, from 18th May to 8th July 1812. The singularly most glorious day was 24th June, when the gem of the collection, an edition of Boccaccio dating from 1471, was sold to the Marquess of Blandford (later Duke of Marlborough) for £2260. To mark the occasion, the bibliographer Dibden assembled the greatest bibliophiles of the day at dinner in St Albans Tavern, and there and then founded the Roxburghe Club, limited to twenty-four members. It may well be that Dibden and his friends did not want the old Duke's achievement to be erased without trace by the new Duke's sale, in which event they succeeded, for the Roxburghe Club is a famed monument to the zeal of book-collectors.

The second line of Roxburghes have been quite a different breed. From the 6th Duke (born in his father's eighty-first year) to the present Duke, they have mostly been soldiers, austere and remote. They have mixed in the highest circles, the 7th Duke marrying into the Churchill family, and the 8th becoming one of the most intimate friends of George V and Queen Mary. It was he who brought new wealth to the family in time-honoured manner by marrying an American multi-millionairess. Cgden Goelet was one of the richest men in New York, and when his daughter May became the future Duchess of Roxburghe he settled £5 million on her. The fortune was subsequently inherited by her son, the late 9th Duke, and her grandson, who now wears the coronet. Roxburghe is at the time of writing the youngest of our dukes, born in 1954.

Like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he served in the army, and continued to do so after succeeding to the dukedom. Roxburghe then learnt something of business to prepare himself for the task of running Floors Castle, his magnificently impressive seat at Kelso set in 53,000 acres. He has now turned it into one of the prime attractions of the Border Country, in triumphant defiance of its centuries of age. He has also opened a fine hotel on the estate (somewhat like the Devonshires, who have built two, and the Rich- monds, who have one at Goodwood), and is active with the local Tourist Board and Wildlife Trust.

In September, 1976, the Duke of Roxburghe married a sister of the present Duke of Westminster, thereby adding another strand to the intricate web of family relationships which unite all ducal families to each other. The Duke of Westminster, the Duke of Abercorn, and the Duke of Roxburghe are brothers-in-law to one another. His son, Marquess of Bowmont and Cessford, was born in 1981, while his daughter, Lady Sophia Innes-Ker, enjoyed a moment of public attention as a delectable bridesmaid at the wedding of Prince Andrew to Sarah Ferguson in 1986.

references

1.

John Buchan,
Montrose,
p. 65.

2.

Complete Peerage.

3.

Winston S. Churchill,
History of the English-Speaking Peoples,

Vol. II, p. 234.

4.

Complete Peerage.

5.

D.N.B.

6.

Walpole, XVII, 506.

7.

ibid.,
IX, 61.

8.

ibid.,
Ill, 59.

9.

ibid.,
XXI, 267.

10.

Harriette Wilson,
Memoirs,
p. 13.