The Duke joined with no visible zest. “Never angry though often bored,” according to one friend, “he takes things very easy indeed,” according to another. Some said his lethargy was laziness, others that it was a well-considered reluctance to hurry; in either event it was underlined by a habit of going to sleep in the midst of things. Even his own speeches bored him and once when speaking on the Indian budget he paused, leaned over to the colleague nearest him on the bench, and suppressing a yawn, whispered, “This is damned dull.”
His only passion was for his racing stud, although he also maintained, whether from passion, habit or indolence, a thirty-year liaison with “one of the handsomest women in Europe,” as she was when the affair began, the domineering, ambitious, German-born Louise, Duchess of Manchester. Her first Duke disappointed her by impoverishing himself, but obedient to his caste, refrained or was persuaded to refrain from bringing any unpleasant public action, leaving his wife and Lord Hartington to enjoy both each other and an unassailable moral and social position. When Manchester died, his widow married the Duke of Devonshire in 1892 just after he had succeeded to his title. Thereafter known as the “Double Duchess,” she continued to exercise her formidable talents toward her major goal, that of making her husband Prime Minister.
The Duke did not give her the necessary help. He was not the kind in whom a burning ambition for the highest post erases every other consideration. When, after he had led the Liberal Unionists out of the party, Lord Salisbury twice offered to serve under him, he again refused, not yet prepared for coalition. By 1895, however, the split between moderate and radical Whigs having widened and the habit of voting in concert with the Tories having made a bridge, the Duke with four other Liberal Unionists crossed over it to serve under Lord Salisbury.
This was the Conservative—now Unionist—Government which took office in June, 1895. A delicate situation was expected at Windsor when the Duke and the other former Liberals, arriving as members of Lord Salisbury’s Ministry to receive their seals of office, would pass their former colleagues on the way out. To avoid embarrassment, the Queen’s Private Secretary tactfully arranged that the outgoing Liberals should deliver up their seals at 11 A.M. while the new ministers waited in another drawing room until their predecessors had left. All would have gone off smoothly but for the Duke, who, arriving late as usual, missed the designated waiting room and met his old associates coming out, who peppered him with taunts about his new friends. “No face was more suited to a difficult situation,” wrote a witness, for the Duke, quite unperturbed, “passed through them with his mouth wide open and his eyes half closed.”
The Cavendishes stemmed from an ancestor who had been Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. His son John was the man who killed Wat Tyler, for which he was knighted on the spot by Richard II, while the father was seized elsewhere by the mob and beheaded in revenge. Dutifully, if none too enthusiastically, the Cavendishes down through the centuries helped to govern the country. The fourth Duke served briefly as Prime Minister in 1756–57, while Pitt and Newcastle were feuding, but resigned as soon as he could be replaced. His brother, Lord John Cavendish, was twice Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which capacity Edmund Burke praised him for his “great integrity … and perfect disinterestedness” but wished that Lord John could be “induced to show a certain degree of regular attendance on business” and be allowed only “a certain reasonable proportion of fox-hunting” and no more. The fifth Duke excelled by marrying the ravishing Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whom Gainsborough painted in a pale shining glow against storm clouds, and Reynolds painted laughing with a full-skirted baby on her knee. Her beauty and irresistible charm came in the same excess as her gambling debts, which cost her husband £1,000,000. Fortunately, the Cavendishes were one of the two or three richest families in the kingdom. When his steward regretted to inform the fifth Duke that his heir, the Lord Hartington of that day, was “disposed to spend a great deal of money,” the Duke replied, “So much the better; Lord Hartington will have a great deal of money to spend.”
In the Duke of 1895, neither fortune, nor position as eldest son, nor disinclination to exert himself, nor desire to follow his heart upon the turf were enough to outweigh in him “certain hereditary government instincts.” He felt that “he owed a debt to the State that must be paid.” This sense of obligation, remarked on by all who knew him, originated not only in family estate but also in a consciousness of superior ability. His father, a student of mathematics and the classics, known as the “Scholar” Duke, had educated him at home. Later at Trinity College, Cambridge, despite an idle, sporting, sociable life among the “tufts,” Lord Hartington was the only one of his set to take an Honours degree, a second class in the mathematical tripos. He entered Parliament at twenty-four and achieved his first Cabinet office at thirty. His brother, Lord Frederick Cavendish, also undertook a political career, and in 1882, on his first day as Chief Secretary for Ireland, was assassinated in Phoenix Park in Dublin. The killing of an English minister of the Crown by Irish malcontents created a sensation as great as the death of General Gordon at Khartoum. Whether because of his brother’s murder or some other less obvious reason, the Duke made a habit of always carrying a loaded revolver about with him, and this was a constant source of worry to his family. “He was always losing them and buying new ones,” wrote his nephew, “and there were no less than twenty of them knocking about Devonshire House when he died.”
With the advent of the Duchess, an indefatigable hostess, Devonshire entertainments became the stateliest in Society. Every year on the opening of Parliament, the Duke and Duchess gave a great reception. Every year on Derby Day, Devonshire House, filled with roses and June flowers from the Duke’s gardens, was the scene of a sparkling ball. Before the ball, the King gave a dinner to members of the Jockey Club at Buckingham Palace while the Queen came to dine with the Duchess. In Jubilee Year of 1897 the Devonshire fancy-dress ball was the most famous and lavish party of the era. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire, home of the Cavendishes for four hundred years, house parties reached their peak with the annual visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales, which continued when they were King and Queen. Every royal comfort was anticipated and satisfied, including the presence of the King’s mistress, Mrs. Keppel, brilliant in diamonds, with whom, according to Princess Daisy of Pless, “the King has his bridge in a separate room while in other rooms people are massed together also of course playing bridge.”
Built of the golden stone of the district, Chatsworth was surrounded by an Eighteenth Century park designed by Capability Brown. Luxury was everywhere. Cascades rippled over a series of stone steps six hundred feet long copied after the Renaissance water-landscaping of Italy. A copper willow tree, by an ingenious mechanism, could weep water from every leaf. Elaborate and exquisite garlands of flowers and fruit carved in wood festooned the walls. The library and collection of pictures and sculpture were on a princely scale like the Medicis’ and administered almost as a public trust. Curators in the Duke’s employ kept them open to scholars and connoisseurs, made new purchases and liberally loaned the treasures to exhibitions. The Chatsworth Memling went to Bruges, its Van Dycks to Antwerp, and all year the house was open to the public, who tramped through the halls in thousands. The Duke liked to watch them, and thinking his face as unknown to them as theirs to him, would stand, unconscious of being recognized, “wondering why the housemaid who acted as guide and the whole party had suddenly stood still and were staring at him.” Though racehorses were more to him than books, he once astonished his librarian who was showing him his own first edition of Paradise Lost by sitting down and reading it aloud from the first line with simple pleasure, until the Duchess came in and, poking the Duke with her parasol, remarked, “If he reads poetry he will never go for his walk.”
He was bored by pomp and hated pomposity. When the King decided to make him a Grand Commander of the new Victorian Order, the Duke, “in his sleepy way,”
asked the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Frederick Ponsonby, what he was supposed to do with “the thing.” “Anyone less anxious to receive an order I have never seen. He seemed to think it would only complicate his dressing.” At the rehearsal for King Edward’s coronation in 1902, at which the appearance of the peers wearing coronets with morning dress produced a comical effect, the Duke arrived late as usual and, with his right hand in his trouser pocket and an inexpressibly bored look on his face, strolled about the stage at the bidding of the Earl Marshal. He liked old baggy, casual clothes, never took the slightest trouble with his guests, deliberately ignored those who might prove tiresome, and once, when a speaker in the House of Lords was declaiming on “the greatest moments in life,” the Duke opened his eyes long enough to remark to his neighbor, “My greatest moment was when my pig won first prize at Skipton Fair.” His favorite club, after the Turf, was the Travellers’, known for exclusiveness and an atmosphere of “solemn tranquillity” in which reading, dozing and meditation took precedence over conversation. For the disagreeable task of speaking at public meetings he trained himself by a method he once revealed to the young Winston Churchill when they were appearing together at a Free Trade meeting in Manchester. “Do you feel nervous, Winston?” asked the Duke, and on receiving an affirmative reply, told him, “I used to, but now, whenever I get up on a public platform, I take a good look around and as I sit down I say, ‘I never saw such a lot of damned fools in my life’ and then I feel a lot better.”
When he chose he could be “the best of company,… delightful to talk to,” that is, if conditions were right. At a dinner party in 1885 he arrived tired and hungry after a long day in Committee and sulked in silence when the first courses proved to be fancy but insubstantial French dishes instead of the solid fare that he liked. When a roast beef was brought in, he exclaimed in deep tones, “Hurrah! something to eat at last” and thereafter joined in the conversation. A fellow guest, the writer Wilfred Ward, noticed that in every case where he differed from Mr. Gladstone, who was of the company, Lord Hartington “put his finger on the weak point in the logic which Mr. Gladstone’s rhetoric tended to obscure.” Eighteen years later Ward met the Duke again at the British Embassy in Rome and confronted by a blank face reminded him of the place of their previous meeting. Thereupon the Duke exclaimed with feeling, “Of course I remember. We had nothing to eat.” The inadequate French dishes, as Ward told the story, “had dwelt in his mind for nearly twenty years.”
After succeeding to the title in 1891, he still returned, unlike Salisbury, to visit the House of Commons and “could generally be seen yawning in the front row of the Peers’ Gallery” on the nights of big debates. As Duke he had more work to do than ever. He owned estates in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Sussex, Middlesex and Ireland and personally went over all accounts of his properties and all important questions with his estate agents. He was Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, Chancellor of Cambridge University, President of the British Empire League and patron of various clerical livings to which he had to make appointments. He was director or chairman of various companies in which he had investments, including two railway lines, a steel company, a waterworks and a naval construction company. Though he distrusted his knowledge of business, “once he got a grip of a subject,” according to one of his staff, “then no one was better able to confute a false argument or to see what the real point was.” His mind worked slowly, and if he did not understand a matter at once, he would insist on its being thrashed out all over again until it was clear to him. He performed all his functions while continuing to maintain that he was happiest with his racing stud at Newmarket. Once at Aix-les-Bains he met W. H. Smith, then Conservative Leader of the House of Commons, and promptly sat down to talk politics for half an hour, saying, “it was pleasant in a place like this to have some work to do.” It is possible he would have been more bored out of office than in.
To the Conservative Government of 1895 he brought, besides long experience and the prestige of his name and rank, an immense fund of public confidence banked over the four decades of his career. His disinterestedness was beyond question. So obviously was he above private ambition, wrote the editor of the Spectator, “that no one ever attributed to him unworthy motives or insinuated that he was playing for his own hand. If anyone had ventured to do so, the country would simply have regarded the accuser as mad.” When the Duke took a position, people felt they had been given a lead. He never became Prime Minister or won the Derby but “no one,” said The Times, “had a greater authority in moulding the political convictions of his countrymen.” He remained vaguely puzzled by the extent of his own influence. “I don’t see why I should tell the people what I should do if I had the vote,” he protested. “They will do what they think right and I shall do what I think right. They don’t want me to interfere.” And when the Prince, who, no less than his subjects, relied on the Duke’s judgment of men and issues, consulted him as arbiter of delicate social matters, he complained, “I don’t know why it is but whenever a man is caught cheating at cards the case is referred to me.” He had become, through a combination of heritage and character, a keeper of the national conscience. When a Presence was required for a solemn or ceremonial occasion, the solid, rather melancholy dignity of the Duke fulfilled the need. He was, Lord Rosebery said, “one of the great reserve forces of this country.”
Among Lord Salisbury’s ministers who took their seats in 1895 on the Government Front Bench in the House of Commons were two baronets, the ninth and sixth of their lines, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Sir Matthew White Ridley, Home Secretary. The former, tall, thin and austere, was an arch Conservative, a champion of the Church of England and of the landowning class, known as “Black Michael.” Tart and sharp-tongued, he once, after reading over a Liberal member’s remarks on his budget, said to his secretary succinctly, “Go and tell him he is a pig.” Beside them sat the two squires, Mr. Henry Chaplin and Mr. Walter Long, representatives of the landed gentry, the old untitled aristocracy who “scorned a peerage but made it a point of honor to stand for their county at the first general election after they came of age.” Mr. Long, President of the Board of Agriculture and youngest member of the Government at forty-one, “never said anything in his life that anybody remembered.” He “gently dozes,” as an observer saw him, “his arms folded, his head sunk back upon a cushion, his ruddy October face giving a touch of color to the scene,” while the older Mr. Chaplin “vigorously, wakefully, alertly guards the Empire against the knavish tricks of the Opposition.”
Mr. Chaplin at fifty-four, with his magnificent stature, big handsome head, long nose, prominent chin, sideburns and monocle, was a marked personality, one of the most popular men of his generation, “easily recognizable, familiar to the public. Everyone knew him by sight.” He was the visible symbol of the English country gentleman. His post was the Local Government Board, which dealt with the poor law, housing, town planning, public health and municipal government. Its functions were best described by Winston Churchill, who, on being offered the post in 1908, said, “I refuse to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs. Sidney Webb.” Chaplin performed its duties and those of M.P. with tremendous gravity. He regarded himself, as did his constituents, as the bulwark of the essential Britain, and used to practice his speeches behind hedges the better to do credit to his role. His jovian thunders, the noble sweep of his arm as he spoke from the Front Bench, said a witness, expressed, not vanity, but “the calm, ineradicable conviction of the ruling class.” Undaunted by the most abstruse problems of government, he would tackle the tariff or the Education Bill in the same spirit as a difficult ditch in the hunting field and even undertook the fervent advocacy of bimetalism as a cure for economic ills. Once after a two-hour discourse on this recondite subject, he mopped his brow and leaning over to Mr. Balfour, asked, “How did I do, Arthur?”
“Splendidly, Harry, splendidly.”
“Did you understand
me, Arthur?”
“Not a word, Harry, not a word.”
Arthur Balfour, prince of the Cecil line, nephew of the Prime Minister and his political heir apparent, artist of debate and idol of Society, was the paragon of his party and its official Leader in the House of Commons. He was forty-seven in 1895 and, when his uncle retired in 1902, was to succeed him as Prime Minister. Over six feet tall, he had blue eyes, waving brown hair and moustache, and a soft, bland face that might have seemed vulnerable if it had not been smoothed to an external serenity. His expression was gentle, his figure willowy, his manner nonchalant, but there remained a mystery in his face. No one could tell what banked fires burned behind it or whether they burned or even if they existed.
Rarely seen to sit upright, he reclined in indolent attitudes as close to the horizontal as possible, “as if to discover,” wrote Punch’s parliamentary correspondent, “how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades.” In him all the gifts of privilege had combined. He had wealth, blue blood, good looks, great charm and “the finest brain that has been applied to politics in our time.” He was a philosopher on a serious level whose second major work, The Foundations of Belief, published in 1895, was read by the American philosopher William James with “immense gusto. There is more real philosophy in such a book,” he wrote to his brother Henry, “than in fifty German ones heaped with subtleties and technicalities.”
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