The Dukes

by Brian Masters

  Whatever he said, Norfolk never relinquished his plan to marry Mary. For him, it was a question of families, of dynasties, of succes­sions; it cannot have been love (although Mary sent him love letters) because they had never seen each other. It was a mixture of pride and politics, assuring the succession to the throne, and assuring that this succession would come to the Howards.19 To this end, he was prepared to lie and dissemble. He wrote an abject letter to the Queen, protesting his loyalty, his love, his honour, and claiming that he had never entertained an intention of marrying the Scottish queen against Elizabeth's will; but he sent a draft of the letter to Mary for her approval before laying it before Queen Elizabeth.20 Twice he pro­mised that he had abandoned all plans of marriage, and twice he lied.

  Eventually, Norfolk's amateur conspiracy was exposed; he was arrested, tried (one of his examiners was the Earl of Bedford, ancestor of the Duke of Bedford), and imprisoned. He was inevit­ably condemned to death, but the Queen was a long time making up her mind to sign the warrant. There had been no state executions since her reign began fourteen years before, and she had a natural aversion to the use of the scaffold upon which her mother and step­mother had died. Furthermore, Norfolk was her cousin in blood, and the only Duke in her realm - the first man among her subjects. But he was undeniably a traitor, and she was personally affronted that he had misused her trust. For five long months she allowed him to tremble within the Tower walls, before she finally signed the docu­ment in the spring of 1572. The scaffold had fallen apart with dis­use, and a new one had to be constructed.21 The Duke was beheaded on 2nd June, but spared the indignity of having his bowels ripped out and his head stuck on a spike 011 London Bridge. The Queen

  was seen to be very downcast that day, and unapproachable.22

  * * *

  A word must be said about the Howard religion. A chief singu­larity of the Dukes of Norfolk is that they are Roman Catholic. No other ducal family survives from the Wars of the Roses, which depleted the ranks of the English aristocracy to a disastrous degree, so the Dukes of Norfolk may be said to have adhered to the "old" religion by virtue of historical survival, or because they were of the "old" nobility. It is misleading to think of them as always Roman Catholic; for reasons of political expediency, there have been a number of Protestants among them. The 4th Duke of Norfolk lived as a Protestant, but was still regarded as a Catholic. In the months before he was beheaded in 1572 he wrote a long letter to his children, impressive in its dignity and honesty, but containing a disavowal of the Catholic Church which does not quite ring true. "Upon my blessing beware of blind Papistry, which brings nothing but bondage to men's consciences", he wrote. "Perchance you have heretofore heard, or perchance may hereafter hear, false bruits [rumours] that I was a Papist. But trust unto it, I never since I knew what religion meant, I thank God, was of other mind than now you shall hear that I die in."2S In view of Norfolk's support for the cause of Mary Queen of Scots, and his tacit acquiescence in the proposed invasion of Catholic armies which would rid the country of the Protestant scourge and be welcomed with open arms by the populace (so they thought), Norfolk's eleventh-hour rejection of papistry comes as a surprise. Considering also that his wife and son (Philip, Earl of Arundel) were almost fanatically Catholic, and that this same letter contains exhortations to avoid pride, to eschew worldly gains, to embrace modesty and self-denial, and not to be headstrong (advice he had spent a lifetime rejecting), the exercise appears more like a strategem to avoid reprisals against the Howards. It reads like a letter that is intended for publication. As a denial of the Catholic faith by a Howard, it must be regarded as an aberration.

  Norfolk's son Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel (i 557-1595), who could not claim the dukedom of Norfolk which now lay dormant owing to his father's attainder, was persecuted for his adherence to Catho­licism, and imprisoned in the Tower for eleven years. He wasted and died there, but not before incurring more odium by openly praying for the success of the Spanish Armada. This man was eventually canonised by the Catholic Church in 1970, and is now known as St Philip Howard. Saint or not, his haughty insolent manner did not endear him to those who knew him casually. His son, too, Thomas Earl of Arundel (n 585-1646), inherited that besetting vanity of rank which has plagued the Howards through centuries. He did not suffer himself to be addressed by any beneath him in status, and went so far as to be sent to the Tower for having insulted a fellow peer, Lord Spencer, in 1621. Spencer had made some reflection upon past events in their families. Arundel interrupted him rudely: "My Lord," he said, "when these things you speak of, were doing, your ancestors were keeping sheep !" to which Spencer replied, "When my ancestors, as you say, were keeping sheep, your ancestors were plotting treason." Arundel was not released from prison until he had made an apology.24 Clarendon said that "he thought no other part of history consider­able, but what related to his own family", and also that he was "without religion".

  Owing to their more or less constant Catholicism, the Dukes of Norfolk henceforth retired from the political limelight. The first four dukes had played a leading part in the history of the country for nearly a hundred years, from 1473 until the 4th Duke went to the block in 1572, but thereafter their religion barred them from holding political office. Not for 250 years were the Norfolks allowed to take their seats in the Houses of Parliament. In 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Bill repaired the injustice, and at last the 12th Duke of Norfolk (11765-1842), known as "Scroop" or "Twitch", or "Our Barney", took his seat in the House of Lords, while his son was the first Roman Catholic to sit in the Commons since the Reformation.

  By then the damage of being in a back seat for so long had had its effect. Successive Dukes of Norfolk in the seventeenth and eight­eenth centuries degenerated into a series of amiable eccentrics, obsessed with their own family history and living on the past.The year 1572 might have marked the end of the dukedom were it not for the generosity of Charles II, who revived the title in 1660 by Act of Parliament, after it had lain dormant for nearly a hundred years. The man who was thus restored as 5th Duke of Norfolk (1626-1677) was a gibbering idiot who had suffered brain fever at the age of eighteen from which he never recovered. So dangerous a lunatic was he, that his next brother Lord Henry Howard had packed him off to Italy where he was kept in confinement and never allowed to set foot in England again. The titular Earl Marshal was "unapproachable ... an incurable maniac".25 Reresby saw him in exile and declared that "he laboured under all the Symptoms of Lunacy and Distraction". His younger brothers suspected that this madness was a fiction fostered by Henry Howard, who acted as Earl Marshal in the idiot's place, and they petitioned the House of Com­mons in 1676 to send for the Duke, saying that he was perfectly in command of his senses. The petition was not granted. Reresby and others, who had no axe to grind, were believed, and the risk of having a lunatic let loose on the country's ceremonial was not taken.26 He died unmarried in Italy, his body brought back by laboursome journey, to England, where it was buried one whole year after death. His brother Henry Howard succeeded him as 6th Duke of Norfolk (1628-1684).

  The 7th Duke of Norfolk (1655-1701) is remembered for a witty remark he is reputed to have made to James II,27 and for the notorious affair his wife had with that handsome soldier of fortune, Sir John Germain. The Duchess's adultery was flaunted about town in a way which made a laughing-stock of the poor Duke. Germain would frequently stay at one of the Norfolks' country seats, where he was allocated a bedroom adjacent to the Duchess's own bedroom. The two rooms communicated by a false cupboard, which one walked into, then climbed over a wooden partition, and walked out of again into the next room. The partition inside the cupboard was six feet high, but did not reach the ceiling. One day the Duke came unex­pectedly to his wife's bedroom, and finding the door locked, demanded entry. Germain was of course in bed with her. He had time only to leap out of bed, and on to the partition, where he sat perilously and uncomfortably, naked but for a shirt, not daring to drop down the other side for fear that he would be hear
d. To make matters worse, the Duchess's pet lap-dog followed him to the par­tition, and barked at him all the time, wagging his tail and thoroughly enjoying the fun. The Duke, strange to say, in spite of the racket, did not discover Germain hiding on his perch.28The affair finally exploded in the courts in 1692. The Duke sued Germain for damages "for lying with the Duchess", claiming £100,000. He won his case, but the jury awarded him a miserable 100 marks only, presumably because they knew that he had a mistress himself and London was anyway bored with the spectacle of the Duke and Duchess fighting over lovers. The judge fulminated against him, telling the jury that "he was sorry the world should know how low virtue and chastity were held in England".29 Anne Bagnalls wrote: "The town rings of the Duke of Norfolk's divorce, which will come to nothing but publishing each other's infamy."30 How right she was.

  The Duke died of apoplexy at the age of forty-six, and was suc­ceeded by his nephews the 8th Duke (1683-1732) and the 9th Duke (1686-1777), who was a timid mouse of a man, married to a shrewish virago of a Duchess. It was she who gave the orders, he who obeyed. She was practically Duke of Norfolk herself, and was even called "My Lord Duchess" by those with a sense of humour. At a house-warming party she gave, which "all the earth" attended, Walpole says that "there was all the company afraid of the Duchess, and the Duke afraid of all the company".31 Lady A. Irwin corrobo­rates the impression of a Laurel and Hardy marriage. The Duchess, she says, "must act the man where talking is necessary".32

  At all events, the marriage was childless, but so many Howards were about that there was no danger of the dukedom becoming extinct. It passed to his second cousin, son of Mr Charles Howard, who as 10th Duke of Norfolk (1720-1786) was another eccentric figure of the elegant eighteenth century, a "drunken old mad fellow" who "dressed like a Cardinal".33 But his eccentricity was tame com­pared with the wild excesses of his son the nth Duke, a theatrical, extravagant character who is one of those larger-than-life aristocrats, like the 4th Duke of Queensberry (Old Q), whose personality elbows all others off the pages of social history.

  The 11th Duke of Norfolk (1746-1815) was corpulent, sweaty, muscle-bound, and graceless. He moved, dressed, and ate in a clumsy manner, was perpetually drunk, and never washed. "In cleanliness he was negligent to so great a degree", writes someone who knew him well, "that he rarely made use of water for purposes of bodily refreshment and comfort. He even carried the neglect of his person so far, that his servants were accustomed to avail themselves of his fits of intoxicati.cn, for the purpose of washing him." The servants would lay him out on the floor, undress him, and wash him head to toe while he was semi-conscious, or indeed out cold. He would other­wise presumably have smelt intolerably. He complained one day to

  Dudley North that he suffered badly from rheumatism, and had tried every remedy without effect. "Pray, my Lord," said North, "did you ever try a clean shirt ?"34

  "Jockey of Norfolk" or "The Jockey", as the nth Duke was called, surpassed all competitors in the consumption of wine. He was the most famous drunk of the eighteenth century. The Duke's capa­city to drink anyone under the table, and then proceed to another party to start all over again, was well known. He could drink five or six times as much as anyone else before he would feel the effect. When finally the wine overcame him, after perhaps a whole night of debauchery to which drinking was only a prologue, he would collapse at dawn in the streets, where his harassed servants would find him sleeping peacefully in the gutter or on a bench.

  His boon companion in these excesses was the Prince of Wales. Together, the Prince and the Duke were frequently seen, arms sup­porting each other, staggering up the street. Years later, the Prince and his royal brothers determined to make the Duke so drunk that he would forfeit his crown as champion imbiber. He was invited to a drinking party at the Pavilion in Brighton. He drove over from Arundel Castle, with his famous equipage of grey horses. Tumblers of wine were mixed with tumblers of brandy, the old man drinking one glass with everyone singly, so that he finished by consuming about ten times more than anyone else. The companions fell one by one like ninepins, and the Duke continued, unsteady but standing. Finally, he said he must go home, called for his carriage, and slumped within it. The royal princes, aching with merriment and swooning against the walls, waved him off, having instructed the coachman to drive him round in circles. The poor old Duke thought he was going home to Arundel, but he was driven around and around the Brighton Pavilion for half an hour, fell out at the end of the "journey", and into a bed, waking up the next morning to find he had been tricked into staying the night.35

  Parallel with astonishing capacity for wine, Jockey possessed in equal measure an infinitely expandable stomach. He was the greatest gourmand of his time and the most venerated member of the Beef­steak Club, where he was always ceremoniously ushered to a Chair of State some steps higher than the rest of the diners. He would get through two or three steaks more quickly than they could be served up to him, and when it appeared that he could not possibly take any more, he would clean his plate ready for a fourth. Amazingly, his conversation seems not to have suffered from the onslaught. The strongest port failed to deaden his culture or wit.

  It was the Duke of Norfolk and his royal chum who effected a revolution in eating habits in London society by establishing late hours. At the beginning of the eighteenth century it was customary to dine at four o'clock. By the 1770s this had advanced to seven o'clock for most people, or midnight for those who knew the habits of the Duke of Norfolk. It became fashionable to eat later and later, and to stay up all night. Walpole wrote: "The present folly is late hours. Everyone tried to be particular by being too late; and as everybody tries it, nobody is so. It is the fashion now to go to Ranelagh [where concerts were given at seven] two hours after it is over. You may not believe this, but it is literal. The music ends at ten; the company goes at twelve." People simply spent much less time sleeping than they do nowadays.36

  It was while dining with the Prince at one of these late parties that the news was conveyed to Jockey that he had been deprived by the King of all his offices. A couple of days before he had proposed a toast at the Crown and Anchor "to the sovereign majesty of the people", a sentiment which was seditious to say the least, and not far short of treasonable. Of course, the Duke was drunk at the time, but nonetheless he had to be shown that he had gone too far. When he tried to strike up conversation with the King shortly afterwards, George cut him short in mid-sentence, saying, "A propos, my lord, have you seen 'Blue Beard' ?"

  In order to hold office and to sit in Parliament (this was half a century before the Catholic Relief Bill), Jockey had renounced the Roman Catholic religion in 1780, but he remained a Catholic at heart for all that, especially when drunk, as everyone in the House knew. He was not always sober there either.

  Another of Jockey's drinking companions was a Mr Huddlestone, who after one night of intoxication fell off his chair to the floor. A younger Howard went to assist the man to his feet, but the drunkard would have none of it. "Never shall it be said that the head of the house of Huddlestone was lifted from the ground by a younger branch of the house of Howard," he bellowed. The good-humoured Duke responded well. "The head of the house of Howard is too drunk to pick up the head of the house of Huddlestone," he said, "but he will lie down beside him with all the pleasure in the world."

  And he lay on the floor.38

  Glimpses like this show that old Jockey was far more than the "dirty devil" that unkind Creevey called him, far more than a miser­able drunkard, and it explains why, in spite of his eccentricities, he was enormously popular. He was never a violent drunk, never offen­sive, never really objectionable. He was essentially a good man whom life had treated badly. He had married twice, and his second wife, who survived him, had become a lunatic. Lady Holland put his case neatly. "The Duke of Norfolk is an extraordinary instance of the impossibility of situation being sufficient to secure happiness : he, how­ever, finds in his own good temper an antidote to all the vexations of his lif
e. He has all that rank, dignity, and wealth can give; he mar­ried a beautiful woman whose person he liked, possessed of £15,000 per annum. About eight years after she became mad, and from being intestate her immense possessions escheat to the Crown, there being no male heir to the Scudamores. It appears to be a hardship that the laws afford no relief to a person united to one insane, as no pretext can be more valid towards the dissolution of a marriage than an obstacle of that nature that impedes the fulfilling of every function belonging to the institution. He maintains with solid mag­nificence the splendour of his rank; everything about him bespeaks wealth and luxurious comfort. His servants are old domestics, fat, sleek, and happy; his table is profuse and exquisite. His taste is bad; he loves society, but has no selection, and swallows wine for quantity, not quality: he is gross in everything. The Duchess' madness has taken a sombre, farouche turn : she hates all mankind. The clergyman during a lucid interval advised her to read religious books, supplied her with some, and mingled his advice with pious exhortations. She acquiesced, and took the books. A few days after she returned them with scorn, saying, 'I wish I could believe your damned trumpery, as I should then be certain two-thirds of mankind would roast in Hell.' It was curious that in the Gospels she could find matter to gratify her malignity. The Duke behaves uncommonly well to her."39

  We, in an age less obsequious towards revealed truth, might find it not so "curious" and if this be an example of the Duchess's ravings, they appear more akin to solid good sense. But in truth she was much further gone than this. Wraxall speaks of her "disordered intellect", and the Public Record Office contains pages of information about her insanity, as the records relating to the Scudamore inheritance reside there.